SHAME FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME
The current cultural zeitgeist considers shame to be a purely destructive emotion and abhors the stigma caused by many long-standing social norms, viewed as a form of oppression. To liberate the oppressed, we must challenge and eliminate any lingering shame attached to (among other conditions) obesity, physical disability, gender identity, neurodiversity, and a range of sexualities, including those that fall into the broad category known as kink.
Rather than succumbing, the victims of shame must throw off its yoke and feel proud of themselves, encouraged by a raft of anti-shame movements and proliferating pride days on the calendar – e.g., The Fat Acceptance Movement and Neurodiversity Pride Day. Such pride and acceptance movements of course replicate the anti-stigma approach originally adopted by homosexuals following the Stonewall uprising in 1969.
As I argued in my last book, gay pride embodies a kind of shame defiance (“I refuse to let you shame me!”) rather than authentic pride. After all, there’s no reason to feel proud of being homosexual any more than one should feel proud of being heterosexual. All subsequent pride movements adopt a similar approach, agitating for supposed pride-in-identity to escape from shame and stigma. I view shame defiance as a necessary (but insufficient) step toward the development of authentic self-regard.
Shame defiance often goes hand-in-hand with accusations of intolerance and bigotry, leveled against those who persist in viewing the identity in question as a disorder or as an unhealthy condition. Dissenters are denounced as ableist, for example, or accused of kink-shaming; others are labelled transphobes or fatphobes, variations on the term homophobia coined in the 1960s by psychologist George Weinberg.
We normally use the word phobia to mean a fear or aversion that is extreme or exaggerated, out of proportion to the stimulus. Acrophobia, for example, applies to people with an irrational fear of heights. In modern coinage, however, a -phobe of any stripe is an intolerant bigot. The distaste or dislike fatphobes supposedly feel for obese people demonstrates moral defect rather than irrational fear. We don’t view them as suffering from a treatable mental disorder like acrophobia but rather as deplorables who have no place within a tolerant society. They deserve to be cancelled and cast out for their bigotry.
Throughout human history, shame and stigma have been used to punish those who violate group norms (think Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter), and the worst offenders are often banished from the group, tribe or city-state. Your behavior makes you undeserving of membership and so we can no longer tolerate you within our society.
Think of it as public shaming by exclusion. According to evolutionary psychologists, our capacity to feel or anticipate such a shame experience has survival value because it promotes adherence to those norms supporting tribal unity. Violate those norms and you’ll find yourself on the outside with little chance of making a go of it alone.
In our modern world, we’re attempting to eliminate nearly all existing social norms as instruments of oppression, and thereby to eradicate the experience of shame. No one is allowed to shame anyone for anything, even for publicly engaging in behaviors we would have found shocking less than a generation ago.
Apparently, the only attitude that deserves to be shamed today is an unwillingness to accept the abolition of traditional norms. If you believe I should be stigmatized for behaviors that violate those norms, then you are a deplorable -phobe and deserve to be publicly vilified. I will do everything I can to destroy your reputation and have you banished.
Shame for thee but not for me.