Shame
This will be a quickie, followed perhaps by a long leisurely, after I’ve heard some of your thoughts. Ellen Goodman, who will be retiring from the Globe shortly, wrote a recent op-ed about shame:
If, as anthropologists say, shame comes from a violation of cultural norms, it seems to have found its match in a newer cultural norm: fame. Notoriety isn’t so notorious anymore. If Hester Prynne were around, she wouldn’t be the subject of a novel, she’d be the author of a tell-all memoir with cellphone pictures of a buff Arthur Dimmesdale.
But enough about sex and shameless. How about money? While Dupre was making her debut, eyes were turned on Wall Street bankers. As President Obama said on “60 Minutes,’’ “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers.’’ The bankers who were too big to fail took the TARP money, ran, then paid much of it back so they could return to their boffo bonus ways. They are the latest incarnation of CEOs who get paid for nonperformance and masters of the universe convinced they deserve to be on the right side of the escalating pay gap.
When 12 bankers were invited to the White House woodshed Monday, three didn’t make it. Bad weather delayed their flights. Well, I have one word for those bankers: Amtrak.
The impetus for this article was that Ashley Dupre, the sex worker in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, has been given an advice column in the New York Post. To be honest, I have no problem with that. There are no professional certifications to be an advice columnist, and on her first couple of outings, Ms. Dupre doesn’t seem to be doing a half-bad job. I can’t imagine, aside from base prejudice, why anyone who gave it more than a moment’s thought would think a sex worker wouldn’t make a potentially excellent advice columnist.
But although I disagree with Ms. Goodman’s assertion that Ms. Dupre ought to be shamed (presumably by consigning her forever to the profession that she ought to be ashamed of belonging to in the first place?), I do think she’s on to something about those bankers.
But I think she only got half of it right. While bankers, fame pursuers of the likes of the balloon boys’ family and the White House gatecrashers, and Boston drivers, bikers, and pedestrians all seem remarkably immune to shame, contemporary culture does shame many of us.
How many of you feel ashamed because of your weight?
How many of you feel ashamed because you aren’t model-beautiful?
How many of you feel ashamed because you have lost a job?
How many of you feel ashamed because you are not rich?
How many of you feel ashamed because you haz a sick?
How many of you feel ashamed because you “aren’t doing anything” with your degree?
How many of you feel ashamed because you don’t have a degree, or don’t have one from the “right” school?
I’ve finally identified the emotion I feel when people ask me if I’m going to go on “Oprah.” It’s not disappointment. It’s shame. I didn’t make it. I wasn’t successful enough. I’m not Elizabeth Gilbert. How pathetic that I’ve even tried.
I think we do shame people in this culture — or at least, persistent advertising-driven media messages do. We don’t shame them about their morality or effort, but about their bodies, their money, their prestige or lack thereof. And when people actually try to improve their life through real effort as opposed to a gimmick, we tend to shame that, too. Ask a fat person sometime what kind of comments they get when they exercise. (No, exercise won’t necessarily make you thin, but it will improve your life and health.) Ask someone how they feel when they have to say no to TGIF drinks, or stick to water, because they are saving for a house.
It’s not only that we honor the unworthy. We actually shame those who try to better themselves.
Okay, that was a little longer than I thought. But the idea was STILL to hear your thoughts on the topic, not mine! So make with some insights, already, mmkay?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (7)
7 Responses to “Shame”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe
It’s hard to add more insight when the original piece was already so insightful!
Having said that, I hope this makes sense – I feel like the way our society rolls and has been rolling for the last 20 years or so is that self-loathing and self-hatred is seen as a “character builder”, that having any shred of self-esteem for oneself or encouraging that in others is seen as weak, particularly if one isn’t rich/thin/”successful” (whatever that might entail)/etc. In my head, shame and shaming others is simply an extension of that attitude, a really insidious and often passive-aggressive extension of it. It’s strange, because on the flip side, I feel like there’s rampant entitlement running around with very little shame attached to it. But maybe entitled behavior is just another subtle way of shaming others for not being rich enough or successful enough to be in the position to behave all entitled-ish?
I had not considered that pressure to conform to an increasingly narrow and unrealistic physical form and social lifestyle as “shame” before. Huh. But I admit that I have to agree that it is. I occasionally feel forceably “shamed” by others because of my current status as a single woman with no plans to marry or have children. I am not ashamed of this, but sometimes am forced to wonder if I should be.
And Jane’s comments are interesting, too. I see a lot of “self-esteem building” activities being pushed at children, including sham awards (everyone is a winnter! everyone is an honor student! you can do anything!) which fall away to the peculiarly entitled adult attitude, which I can see often seems to be that if you have enough self-loathing and/or -hatred, you are then entitled to feel entitled.
I am not sure I’m making sense just yet, but this is a new spin at looking at these issues.
(Personally, though, having read Ashley Dupre’s columns — 2, I think — I have found them rather uninspired so far. I do not think she need hide her head in the sand, but I’d hoped that with her rather peculiar standing in our capriciously “moral” society that she would offer a unique or at least interesting perspective on, say, the institution of marriage.)
Just got one of those nice viral emails about Life Lessons, originally from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, apparently. This especially caught my eye–
“What other people think of you is none of your business.”
Good news!
(Now all I have to deal with is what I think of myself. Which is mostly just fine.)
I think, as your examples show, that we shame people in ways that are most likely to get them to spend money.
We honor those who spend money, and shame those who do not, in an effort to make them feel as if they have to.
I agree with your insight about society shaming people who try to better themselves through real effort. I’d add that society also shames people who try to better themselves through gimmicks. If the gimmick doesn’t work, the person is shamed for being gullible. If the gimmick does work, the person is shamed for taking a “shortcut” (for example, society tells gastric bypass and liposuction patients that if they had more willpower, they could have succeeded with diet and exercise).
Shame can go to a meta-level when a person is ashamed that they feel ashamed. In my more depressed moments, I think about all the self-esteem stuff that my supposedly entitled generation was exposed to growing up (I got trophies for participation and lessons in elementary school on the theme of “I am unique and special”), and wonder what’s wrong with me that it didn’t result in fabulous self-esteem for me.
Eve, that’s not anything wrong with you–it’s (if anything) what’s wrong with the lessons and trophies. Kids can smell something wrong with people being extravagantly proud of them for something that they didn’t put any effort into, which must happen all the time. There can be something insulting about it, as if the real challenge was deliberately left out.
That’s why a certain amount of competition, on the order of auditioning for ranked seats in the flute section, is healthy: the one who works harder actually gets rewarded, and feels deserving.
Robin, nice to see you today, on my stomping grounds!
What an insightful article! Like other posters, I hadn’t considered these societal pressures as a kind of shaming before now. I think to a certain extent our society considers shame to be morally virtuous, almost as if it’s an extension of humility. This may connect to the idea of shaming those who try to improve themselves.
Also, we don’t generally compare our lives to people who did “worse” than we did- we compare ourselves to those who did better, by some entirely subjective measurement. I’ve never thought to compare my life to the lives of my high school classmates who didn’t go to college, but I compare myself frequently to my college classmates who went on to grad school. And while taking a lab tech job was the right choice for me financially and personally, I do feel quite a bit of shame about it. More than that, I’m ashamed to be enjoying my job- like I shouldn’t be happy in a low-prestige position even though the pay is decent and my coworkers are awesome.