As the New Year ticks over, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...
In today's edition - IT'S IN! - Shaming!
Until recently, shaming was a term probably more
associated with the honour killings you hear about in those nasty stories about
Muslims. Now it’s become a tool of the young, well-meaning, progressive Left.
It’s no surprise that social media is the arena where most of it plays out.
In June, a scientist called Tim Hunt made a ‘joke’ to an
audience about women in the science profession. The media got wind of the
‘joke’ and did not find it funny. Commentators lined up to castigate the man,
and he was duly dropped from his position. Reactionaries cried ‘Liberal
fascists!’, ‘feminazis’ and, of course, ‘’political correctness gone mad”. But
the moment for sexist jokes has passed, and unless you’re ironically adopting
the role of the man who says wrong things in public, a la Ricky Gervais in character, you can’t get away with saying
“female scientists cry when they’re criticised.”
Some genuinely mean people have started a little group
called Overweight Haters Ltd, which hands out sanctimonious cards to people
they deem overweight. What purpose this has I have no idea. Those who condemn
the activity called it fat-shaming, and articles and memes have duly spread.
Slut-shaming, which kicked off this new era of shaming, had its modern rebirth
in 2011 in Canada when a policeman said that women could avoid sexual assault
by not dressing as ‘sluts’. The response was the Slutwalk, a protest against
the habit of some to blame the victims rather than the perpetrators of rape;
and an in-your-face expression of women’s rights to act how the hell they want
and fuck off if you don’t like it.
The act of shaming is by no means confined to the left, but
the terminology is certainly lefty. Slut-shaming and fat-shaming are attributed
to the patriarchal and sexist society in which we live, and the enthusiastic, moralistic
exercise of the right to demean others. Both take place because the
expectations we have developed about how women (for the most part) should look
and behave, the answer being – hot but not too
naughty.
But being hot leads to its own problems, as I well know. So
does Charlotte Proudman, who received a message on LinkedIn from an older man
who wanted to tell her that her photo was ‘the best LinkedIn picture [he’s]
ever seen!’ He also used the word ‘stunning,’ the wretched brute. Charlotte
replied smartly to her admirer and explained precisely why she was offended. So
far so good. Then came the shame. She screengrabbed it and shamed him all over
the place. Shamed him good, she did.
Since then, Proudman has become a Guardian columnist and
something on an expert on misogyny, leading some to conclude that she is a sly
opportunist who used the (fairly innocent, so they say) indiscretions of an
online contact to catapult herself into a new career. Others say she’s a torchbearer
of women’s issues, highlighting the supposed ‘innocence’ of everyday sexism
itself. Because this all takes place in the digital sphere, and concerns
closely held ethical beliefs, shaming has an ugly brother – the death threat.
Everyone who shames is apparently mortally vulnerable, encouraged to kill
themselves, or, in the case of women, promised rape. It’s as reliable as an
argument following Christmas dinner.
To shame or to be shamed? That’s the little conundrum we’ve
gotten ourselves in to.
Shaming has this year become part of the social vernacular,
a nifty way to point out people’s wrongdoing. Sometimes it’s claimed by the
victim, as with fat-, slut- and now sweat-shaming, which is when people point
out the unseemly act of (women) perspiring. Other times it’s targeted at the
bad behaviour of others, such as the new big American hobby of drought-shaming.
This involves ‘naming and shaming’ those who use too much water in a drought. So,
for those that use the word, shaming is sometimes bad and sometimes good,
depending on the direction of criticism. Similarly, ‘tax-shaming’ has be coined
to deal with Amazon, Starbucks and their dodgy friends.
Gratuitous-banker-bonus-shaming hasn’t quite hit yet, but give it time.
There are probably a few more shaming terms yet to be
introduced to makes sense of what is happening to the victimised among us. I
could see the year ahead offering up such gems as skinny-shaming,
hipster-shaming, diet-shaming, beard-shaming, depression-shaming,
vegetarian-shaming and Lidl-shaming. Indeed, anyone on the receiving end of
criticism or hate (which is a hell of a spectrum) is likely to cry ‘shamed!’
just as long as they can put a snappy prefix on it.
Then there’s the media, the big boys, who do an excellent
job of pointing out the shamelessness of women. Newspapers and magazines get paparazzi
shots and put red circles around the shameful thing, be it a sweat mark, a side-boob,
a patch of unshaven hair on a leg or in an armpit, drunkenness, swearing, or
whatever unladylike thing a woman, often famous, has done to degrade humanity.
The obvious response to this, as far as I can tell, is a lengthy campaign of
shame-shaming, directed at the tabloids. Over to you, Twitter.
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p.s.
As part of what is sometimes called 'clicktivism', the rhetoric and politics of shaming have got much to do
with that of privilege, which made a little appearance on this blog here.
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