my partner doesn’t use pet names nearly as much as i do, which is very funny because i will crack my gay little knuckles and say some shit like “good morning my sun and moon, my loveliest boy, my baby my sweetheart my darling dearest” and he will reply “hello adrian”
if you ever interact with someone who is mentally ill/mad/pathologised or disabled in some way, assume they are trying hard enough. act as if they are trying hard enough. dont even consider it an option that they arent trying hard enough. if they are failing to meet some goal or expectation, it is despite trying hard enough.
I don’t like life. I am not grateful to my parents for giving it to me. Life is like an heirloom parrot that requires a ridiculously large enclosure and calls me slurs and bites me and costs me thousands of dollars in upkeep and vet bills but because I inherited this stupid bird and I have known it all my days, I refuse to give it up. Not something I would choose for myself but something I must keep and endure the misery of it out of love and obligation. Maybe one day the parrot and I will get along but for now I am caring for it and we are uneasily coexisting.
Everyday, I wake up and I feed the bird and I clean her cage and I try to talk to her and admire her pretty plumage because I am not cruel. But I am not happy.
When you recognize that you don't have status or influence, it affects your self-concept -- and your social behavior.
Throughout this research article, I see the echoes of shame and how it influences a person’s ability to relate to others or shape their life into what they want it to be. Shame is not explicitly mentioned once in the paper, but the effects of low power that the authors mention are eerily similar to the effects of being ashamed: ashamed people are also more deeply inhibited, less likely to express what they want, less authentic, less present in their relationships, less open, unwilling to initiate with others or to engage in productive conflict, trapped in the fallout of even small hardships and rejections, mistrustful, unhappy, and lonely.
As I’ve wrote about at length in my third book, shame is a hiding of one’s face. Ashamed people instinctively take on crouching, self-protective postures, speak less, look at people less, and feel physically frozen. Ashamed people are more submissive and passive. Their bodies produce less oxytocin, a hormone associated with social bonding. They avoid others and are less likely to take social initiative.
When a person is publicly shamed, one of the primary goals is often to make them cover themselves, or drive them out of public life. The core emotional experience of being ashamed is to feel that you are fundamentally bad as a person, usually because some essential part of you is out of step with your society’s rules, and so you must do everything in your power to hide that vulnerable, unspeakable part from others lest you be even further attacked.
And who is most likely to feel ashamed, disengaged, panicky, and passive in these ways? People who lack power.
Prior studies have found that when people perceive themselves as being low in social rank, they are more likely to feel shame. Historian Peter Stearns has observed that it is societies with greater inequality that are the most prone to wield shame in order to keep its members in line — and it is always individuals who are lower-status (such as children, enslaved people, women, people with darker skin, people with disabilities, and people in poverty) who are the most likely to be societally shamed.
All of this moves me to ask: if individuals high in shame behave in the exact same ways as people who perceive themselves as having no power, and it is people who possess very little power and status who are the most likely to be shamed, what is shame other than a recognition that you lack power?
And what are the actions of the ashamed but an entirely reasonable attempt at conserving energy, avoiding future social attacks, and removing yourself as much as possible from a society that hates you?
One of the outgrowths of shame that most fascinates me is systemic shame, in which a capitalist culture offloads all blame for large-scale societal problems onto the very individuals who have the least ability to do anything about them. A pattern of widespread societal neglect followed by systemic shaming of the victims has played out in our world countless times:
Gay men and drug users are left to perish from HIV without even any acknowledgement from the government for years, and then the virus is blamed on their supposedly irresponsible choices. As global temperatures continue to rise, oil companies encourage individual consumers to keep track of their personal “carbon footprint,” no matter how little control they have over how much they drive or what they can consume. The federal government deliberately limits access to COVID masks, tests, and ventilation supplies while opening restaurants, then claims the pandemic spread because of individual people not masking enough and holding house parties.
We can’t ignore the tendency for systemic shame to fall upon the most marginalized and the least resourced — the people with the least power.
Poor, criminalized drug users are blamed for choosing not to say “no” to the one thing that keeps them comfortable sleeping on the street and night. Black people’s cries for justice are ignored, and they are criticized for not outlining a flawless, easy plan for attaining racial justice in a positive-enough tone. Legions of sexual assault survivors are challenged on how they dressed, where they walked around at night, whom they dated, and how they identified, as if their choices created the circumstances of their mistreatment. And vulnerable, statistically tiny populations such as Autistics and transgender people become the scapegoats for conditions of mass economic injustice and political disenfranchisement.
The impact that shame has on the psyches of the powerless is massive. It is consistently the people who are pushed most to the margins of the world who are most likely to hate their bodies, lack self-esteem, report social anxiety, experience extreme tension in their relationships, and feel incapable of asserting themselves.
We know from a rich scientific literature going back decades that shaming individuals does not work at motivating them to take action, or to change behaviors that might be hurting them. Yet as a society, we keep reaching for shame as a cudgel against the fat, the disabled, the Black, the queer, the elderly, and the feminine. The goal of all this shame has never been to help anyone. It has been to maintain their low-status, powerless position.
Activists often push for leaders to feel more shame, and liberals in particular wonder why the likes of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, and so on do not feel more shame. But why would they? What risk of social rejection do they ever face? Even if the majority of the world were to turn against them (and most polling suggests that people all over the world do loathe them in great numbers), what consequence would that bring? With their access to wealth and military might, they feel they have little reason to fear the judgments of others.
The immensely wealthy and powerful are often described as shameless. It seems intuitive to me now that it is their power that renders them incapable of feeling shame. Shame is a social emotion that appears in circumstances of low power and threat. There is no need for such a sensitive and responsive social emotion when you bear no social responsibility to anyone at all.
When activist movements attempt to direct shame toward politicians, such as when ACT-UP activists draped a gigantic condom over Senator Jesse Helms’ house, or pro-Palestinian organizers gather in the streets declaring shame on the genocidal state of Israel, they are attempting to make powerful, insulated figures accountable to public censure.
It’s an idea that’s philosophically headed in the right direction — take those with wanton shamelessness and try to force them into a state of shame. But without upending the structures of power that insulate them, symbolic attempts at shaming do not fully connect. We cannot appeal to the emotions or morals of large institutions that exist only to gather resources, claim land, and bulldoze over anyone in their path. They are indifferent to our feelings, and speak only the languages of violence and forcible theft.
Think of how many public figures had their names briefly dragged through the mud during the era of #MeToo only to rise back into cultural prominence with their careers barely scathed a few years later. Celebrities, politicians, and other figures with a high degree of social status were briefly incensed that the public could rally against them on platforms like Twitter to try and shame them, and decried the violence of “cancel culture” because they hated seeing the masses presuming to have more power than they actually had.
But in practice, these mass shaming rituals were often quite toothless. For the most part, the public outcries that have been the most successful have been the ones directed toward the already powerless — small creators, random trans women internet micro-celebrities, and people whom the public were already primed to hate. When a celebrity has been effectively shamed into the darkness, they often had some social vulnerability that made it easier for their power to be taken away — they were Black, or disabled, or had a mental illness that prevented them from fully reaching the highest echelons of power. They still had weak spots. And so they could still be shamed, to some extent.
If shame is merely a reflection of the power that someone holds, then the only way to properly take down the shame-worthy is to remove their power with force. The United States government, Israel, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Amazon, Elon Musk, Sean Combs, every fascist politician or moneyed alt-right thinker that has wrought destruction and imposed their order across the globe— there is no appealing to their human natures, no forging any kind of mutual relationship of the sort equals might form. They feel no shame because the power they hold over us is so utter, and we can only bring them down to our level by taking their power out.
And if the overwhelming feelings of shame that haunt the marginalized come from them accurately recognizing and responding to their lack of power, then the answer for them is not radical acceptance, gentleness, affirmation, self-care, disclosure, or any of the standard therapeutic techniques that fill all of the self-help books on the subject. It’s to give them power. And to join together alongside them, collectively, so we can build a real and deeply-felt sense of power as a community.
It is truly amazing how so many of the feelings and behaviors we try to control or "unlearn" are actually just perfectly natural and deeply human reactions to being trapped in what is a purposefully cruel and exploitative system.
The wild thing about The Locked Tomb is that sexism, homophobia, and transphobia aren’t really a thing, but the Patriarchy is - but that patriarch is just one guy and that one guy is Taika Watiti.
my soda gland is horribly oversized & currently contains dozens & dozens of litres of refreshing carbönated sweet divine ambrosia & it hurts so so bad but every time i offer some of that delicious nectar to a thirsty traveller they always decline it because they "dont want to drink something from a Gland" 🙄
The Color Game. “Humans can’t reliably recall colors. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it. We’ll show you five colors, then you’ll try and recreate them.” I scored 39/50 but got a perfect score on one color.
have you ever seen somebody fully naked irl (but not in a sexual encounter)? I’m wondering if people are including shirtlessness/toplessness and it’s skewing the results.
Cause I see people saying beaches, and I doubt everyone’s going to nude beaches… I also see a lot of people saying locker rooms too, but are y’all just stripping in your locker rooms?
Have you ever seen somebody fully naked irl (but not in a sexual encounter)?
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