Topic for Sep. 7. ( Thur )

[Alex !]

Shame Machine 

The Shame Industrial Complex Is Booming. Who’s Cashing In? And Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation

-nytimes.com posted on

One of my earliest encounters with shame occurred at a wedding when I was 9. Shy and socially awkward, I found myself at a table with my parents and a group of elderly relatives while other kids plotted soft crimes and sipped from abandoned glasses of champagne.

I don’t remember what song was playing when my mother reached for my little pastel-colored purse and playfully tossed it onto the dance floor, but I do remember picking up the mug of Irish coffee that sat next to her and tipping it over her lap.

We left the reception immediately, my mother in her ruined dress and me with her handprint emblazoned across my face. An old man stopped us as we neared the exit. “That was a bad thing you just did,” he said to me, “but I still think you’re a good girl.” I wished that the earth would crack open and swallow up the both of us.

Over the ensuing years, I have developed an intimate relationship with shame. I think about what it means to feel it, what it means to inflict it and what role it plays in a culture that alternately lauds or castigates those who deviate from the mean. The primary social function of shame — often a tool of oppression and always one that aims to police those who bear witness — is to neutralize transgression via humiliation, to force consensus by threat of moral exile.

In a new book, “The Shame Machine,” examines how shame has been both commodified and weaponized by a society that is increasingly estranged from real life. Who stands to profit from our ubiquitous shame-driven culture wars? she wonders. And is there anything to be gained from them?

The shame is often a lonely experience, which is perhaps why it is so easy to exploit it for profit. Nowhere is this monetization more evident than in the weight loss and wellness industries.

Propped up by social media influencers and celebrity endorsements, companies that make products promising to shrink our bodies or re-elasticize our saggy faces have realized astronomical growth over the past decade. 

The Shame Machine” suggests that there is much profit to be made from our low self-esteem, mostly because there is not a diet in the world that will fix it. In what O’Neil terms “the shame industrial complex,” corporations and social infrastructures insist that we are endowed with the power to contour our own lives, and then blame us when their tools inevitably fail.

It dismantles how we abdicate our social responsibility for caring for the vulnerable when we indulge in the notion that poverty and drug addiction result from a failure to self-actualize. 

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are particularly invested in sowing the seeds of discord, mostly because political and social disagreements inevitably escalate engagement.

"Healthy shaming” — let’s call it a lateral punch. The lateral punch is the blow that we strike against people who do not share our social value systems; what is quietly at play in even the “healthiest” of shaming: 

I sometimes remember how it felt to skulk toward the car with my mother after leaving my aunt’s wedding, the mark on my face evidence of my transgression. I think about the old man who tried to throw me a lifeline, but really only succeeded in reinforcing that we are always being appraised. Does shame work as a tool of correction? Perhaps, but we should be judicious when we deploy it. Dignity is easily eroded and hard to regain.