Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification - Couverture rigide

Petro, Melissa

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0593714997 ISBN 13 : 9780593714997

Editeur : G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024

Synopsis

In the spirit of Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist comes a courageous, in-depth investigation into the modern epidemic of shame in our society—what it is, why women are uniquely susceptible, and how we can shift the shame off our plates and live our best lives in an over-exposed, image-obsessed world.

For millions of women, shame is a vicious predator. It tells us we are less than, that we are unworthy. We try everything to escape shame—ignoring it, intellectualizing it, and even, ironically, shaming ourselves for feeling it. The reality is that women experience shame more frequently and more intensely than men—a direct result, as acclaimed journalist Melissa Petro explains, of a patriarchal culture that “urges women to feel bad about themselves, and then punishes them when they do.” Why can’t we figure out how to break the shame cycle once and for all?

In Shame on You, Petro takes on the issue of women’s shame directly with an unflinching look at the social systems that encourage women to believe we are deeply inadequate. From shame’s beginnings ( Maybe she’s born with it? Nope, it’s misogyny.) to its effect on our lives as adults (How the humiliation of “bad women” affects us all.), shame poisons our friendships, romantic relationships, and work lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Blending investigative reporting, science, literature, and hundreds of women’s personal stories—including her own shameful account of winding up as an unwitting New York Post cover girl—Petro offers us a new way forward. No matter what you do, she explains, there is no escaping being judged. And yet, the women we can become—sometimes as a consequence of shame, rather than in spite of it—are powerful indeed. And maybe that’s what others are afraid of.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Melissa Petro is a journalist whose writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, InStyle, and many other national publications. She was a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize, and she holds a bachelor in Women’s Studies from Antioch and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The New School. She lives with her husband and two young children in Upstate New York.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

1

Perfect Monsters

How Society Weaponizes Shame Against Women

My neighbor Penny tells me that she hits herself. A fortysomething-year-old, happily married stay-at-home mom to one exceptionally well-behaved toddler, she's not exactly the person you'd picture pounding her own fists into her head. Penny's the kind of woman who still irons her husband's shirts, a middle-class white lady living in the suburbs who deadheads petunias and handwrites thank-you cards. Penny's the woman in your friend group who makes the reservation. When there's a shitty job no one wants to do, she's the mom who happily volunteers first.

Self-harm isn't exactly what most consider normal, yet the gist of what started Penny's undoing will sound familiar to every woman everywhere: by her own account, Penny piles too much on her plate, then feels ashamed because she can't get it all done while the stress of trying to do so, she says, makes her act like "a monster."

It happened just this past Saturday, Penny told me, when she and her family were leaving for a weekend trip to the beach. Her husband, Greg, stood at the door, keys in hand, while Penny rushed around the house, packing and tidying, getting angrier by the minute until Greg expressed gentle impatience, and Penny's rage boiled over. She shouted at her husband, who-Penny said-just stood there, momentarily dumbfounded, before he started shouting back in defense.

"And now Greg and I are shouting at each other, and Hudson is crying, and then everyone is crying." Until, Penny said, she resorted to an old coping mechanism as a way of making it stop: "I went into the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the toilet, and started hitting myself in the head."

Penny's casual laughter belied the struggle to trust me and find the courage to be real. I held eye contact as she said it even as my pulse quickened. In our culture, we're conditioned to find another's shame entertaining, and I'm no exception. But I am aware this is a problem, and so rather than feel titillated by my friend's pain, I found ways to empathize. When Penny described her growing anxiety behind the urgent need to make the beds, to replace damp towels with dry ones, to quickly make and pack yet another snack, I could relate to my friend's perfectionism. I, too, have felt the frantic fear that I was forgetting something, the compulsive need to wash every last dish in the sink.

Still, I struggled to synthesize this new information with what I thought I knew about Penny. Of all the moms in our friend group, Penny and Greg appear to have the strongest marriage. They probably have the most money. Hudson's always the best behaved. Penny's the friend who never loses her patience.

She's the mom who always remembers to pack snacks.

Penny never used the word "shame" but I felt it as she told me her story. It pulsed quietly as she described paralyzing anxiety and self-hatred. Even as she shrugged it off casually and softened it with humor, I felt her pain.

Most of us have heard the term "shame spiral," coined by clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman to describe the loss of control triggered by an unsettling event.

That's what happened that day to Penny: failing to live up to society's outdated yet persistent image of the perfect wife and mother, Penny lashed out at her husband, which only made the feeling worse. Even as she felt angry with Greg for not being more helpful, she ultimately blamed herself and took responsibility for the whole situation-so much so that she felt deserving of punishment, which she then inflicted on herself behind the closed bathroom door.

Penny's not only a neighbor, she's also a close friend. Still, it's not unusual for people I barely know to tell me equally personal things. Benign conversations with relative strangers naturally gravitate toward the edges of the permissible. While those around us engage in polite conversation, we're exchanging stories about blow jobs we gave strangers in our twenties or all those extremely regrettable times we lost our shit on our kid.

I tell myself that it's because as a journalist, I'm trained to ask just the right questions. But I know it happens more frequently when people are aware of my own complicated past. These confidantes know that I have experiences in the sex industry, that I was publicly shamed for writing and speaking about these experiences in 2010, and that I still frequently write and speak publicly about these and other presumably shameful experiences.

It happens so often that I sometimes refer to myself as the "shame whisperer."

Whatever the cause, I seem to have a unique, even uncanny ability to Dr. Pimple Pop the darkest secrets out of people. And based on the number of confidences that I receive, this sort of unloading seems to be exactly what a lot of folks long for.

Don't get me wrong: most people would do everything in their power to avoid judgment, let alone humiliation. When we don't measure up to society's expectations of us, we feel deeply flawed and alone. These are intensely painful feelings. No one wants to feel shame.

At the same time, from my unique vantage point, I really do suspect most folks crave a less filtered life. How wonderful it would be if we could speak openly about our messiness, neither glamorizing it nor minimizing our pain. We'd all rather not hide aspects of ourselves and our experiences out of a fear of rejection. We'd all rather be completely ourselves, entirely honest and at ease, and still feel as if we belong. We all want to live unafraid to share who we really are and what's really on our mind. We all want to be the same person regardless of the audience-to have integrity, in spite of our fear. We are as desperate to embody our truths as we are terrified to do so.

So what's stopping us?

What Is Shame, Really?

Shame is a pernicious emotion, one that evades recognition even as it permeates every aspect of our lives. Defined most simply, it's the painful distress that comes from believing we haven't lived up to an expectation: When there is something we think we should have done or been or said or did-but didn't or weren't-shame takes hold. It doesn't matter if the expectation was realistic or impossible. I failed, we think, and it's my fault.

I asked my Facebook friends to describe how it felt, the last time they were struck by shame. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people misinterpreted the assignment. Instead of focusing on themselves, the majority of responders reflected the question outward: offering definitions, referring me to experts, recommending books. If they shared a personal shame story, they told me the details of what happened rather than how it had made them feel.

The fact that folks struggled to describe the physiological response in their bodies is unsurprising; we are not a culture accustomed to describing our feelings. Shame, in particular, defies words. This is because, as we are feeling it, shame seizes our limbic system while shutting down the parts of our brain that are capable of language.

Still, a handful of people answered the question the way I was hoping they would. My friend from high school, Al, described shame as a feeling of intense embarrassment, sadness, and regret.

"I have many memories that I look back on that make me physically ill," he said. "A lot of the time I'm intensely critical of myself after feeling shame, too, and that always turns into depression, even suicidal thoughts in the past."

"Physically, it starts with prickly heat on top of my head, neck, shoulders, back, and arms," Heather said. "Then my vision gets really clear but my hearing seems diminished, and my heart rate increases. Then there's the replay on a loop of whatever it is I'm ashamed of."

"It's more than feeling uncomfortable," Patty Ann said. "It makes me not want to exist."

As with any feeling, what triggers shame differs from person to person. Whereas just the thought of trying on bathing suits might spark extreme anxiety and body hatred in some people, the same situation might elicit a more subtle or even an entirely different emotional response in someone else.

Odds are, though, that you find bathing suit shopping at least a little bit triggering. It's so ubiquitous a trigger that it's been studied: in 2012, researchers at Flinders University in Australia found that just imagining ourselves in a dressing room trying on swimsuits will put most women in a bad mood.

Appearance and body image, family and parenting. Money and work. Mental and physical health. Addiction. Sex. Aging. The traumas we survived. The stereotypes we endure. These are the things, according to social scientists, that really set off our shame reflex.

We are set off, or "triggered," whenever we fear we have failed to meet society's expectations of who, how, and what we should be. In her foundational book Women and Shame, American professor and writer Brené Brown makes clear how we pick up on these expectations from our family and friends (teachers, mentors, health professionals, work colleagues, faith communities, neighbors), as well as from the media (books, music, magazines, movies and television, and the advertising that permeates all facets of modern life). The messages of what we "should be" are so complex and competing that they're frequently unattainable . . . and yet, we internalize them and develop what psychologists call "negative self-talk." In some cases, negative self-talk sounds like "I'm so stupid." Usually, it's more subtle. Maybe when you tell yourself "I shouldn't have done that," the "I'm so stupid" stays silent-but it's there.

Shame is frequently confused for other self-conscious emotions.

Embarrassment, for example, also arises when we become aware that we've broken social norms. The difference is that when we feel embarrassed, we will often, eventually, be able to see the humor in the situation. In some instances, we may deflect shame with humor, but we don't really find it funny; in fact, it is incredibly difficult to speak of. Embarrassment can bring folks together, whereas unprocessed shame does the opposite: it disconnects us from others, and from ourselves, because we feel the need to hide whatever we're ashamed of at all costs.

Shame is more similar to humiliation, in that both feelings are incredibly painful and long-lasting. Take embarrassment and elongate its half-life tenfold. The difference between shame and humiliation is that we recognize a humiliation as undeserved, whereas when in shame, we believe the mistreatment we're enduring is our fault.

Shame is most frequently confused with guilt-the I shouldn't have done that feeling when you make a mistake or do something wrong. The difference? Guilt can motivate a person to change a behavior, make amends, apologize, or rethink our priorities, whereas shame does none of these things. Shame shuts us down, and we are unlikely to take positive actions to address our misdeeds because we don't see our behaviors as the problem; we see ourselves and our whole being as fundamentally flawed. Shame is less a feeling that you've done something bad than it is a feeling that you are bad.

If you're not sure of shame's impact on you and your life, it might help to listen to the stories of other women probably a lot like yourself. I interviewed 150-plus women and gender nonconforming/nonbinary folks, plus some cisgender men, on the topic near (if not dear) to all of our hearts. Together, we explored all the ways that shame is weaponized against women to prevent us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. We talked about the "big" shames we carry, but also those everyday moments where we feel unnecessarily cruddy about ourselves because we're just not meeting some (usually impossible) expectation.

The following quotes illustrate just how endemic shame is to our everyday experience:

Now that I am a mother, there is even more pressure to be selfless, always putting my child's needs before my own. Ever since I was young, I have struggled with self-worth.

In my culture, mental health is just not talked about. There's a phrase in Chinese that translates to mean "eat bitter," meaning suffering is part of life. My dad would say this phrase to me. You just have to work hard, and not complain. My ADD went undiagnosed, and I struggled.

An old boss of mine . . . would call me at 4:00 a.m. stressed, would only reach out to me when I made a mistake,
and would make comments on calls with others that I wasn't wearing makeup. I would work seventy to eighty hours
a week for him almost to "prove him wrong," only to be met with shame at the end of every day.

Sex is complicated for me because of my history. There are things that have happened to me that make intimacy on any level really hard.

I present as straight. I have only been in heterosexual relationships. I think that my family would quickly write me off as attention seeking if I ever defined myself outside of the way that they see me, which is difficult because they don't even really know me.

For a long time, I didn't feel comfortable in my body, and to be honest, after giving birth I still struggle with this a bit. I'm embarrassed by my flabby stomach that won't go away. I am ashamed of feeling this way.

Now that I am an "older woman," I'm always looking at younger women mournfully . . . I look at almost everyone I see and feel like I failed.

Still the Issue of the Day

Twenty years ago, Brené Brown called shame a "silent epidemic." In Women and Shame, Brown identified the emotion as being at the root of a whole host of personal struggles and social ills, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and addiction. Her work lays clear how these and other problems are the natural consequences of what she deems our "culture of shame"-a society that does not allow most of us, but women in particular, to make missteps or mistakes.

It was a message that resonated. Brené Brown went on to achieve true guru status with her TED Talk on the topic, which has received more than ten million views and literally hundreds of glowing-with-gratitude comments. Women were delirious with relief to have shame named for them, and to be offered reassuring kindness, relatable antidotes, and practical advice on how to ease our very real, individual pain.

From Brown's success sprung a whole movement of anti-shame experts who launched an all-out war on shame. Glennon Doyle has written multiple books riffing on the theme that we are born to be warriors, and discussing how we can individually find the strength, bravery, and power to battle shame. Author and yoga instructor Jennifer Pastiloff hosts "shame loss" workshops, seminars, events, and retreats where women work to free themselves from the shackles of shame by embracing their inner asshole and ceasing to give a fuck. And there are many more.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0593714997
• ISBN 13: 9780593714997
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible