because i have an image to uphold

FRIDAY

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.

I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.

If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.

Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.

Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?

All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.

In the first gif, what you’re seeing is a man who has zero idea how to handle a bird. That’s a heavy bird, and he’s got his arm stretched out as far as it will go in an attempt to keep the bird away from his face. What that does is create unstable footing for Uncle Sam. The handler is there trying to hold up Trump’s arm, but the bird has already realized it needs to leave or it will fall. In the first gif the bird is not attacking Trump- it is trying to get away from him so it doesn’t get hurt.

In the second gif, what we see is a bird that remembers what just happened and is blaming Trump for it. Uncle Sam sees Trump reach for its tether, and makes a lunge at Trump’s hand to keep him away. The bird /does not/ want to hang out with Trump because it has learned that Trump has no idea what he is doing.

Uncle Sam is rejecting Trump based on Trump’s proven inability to properly handle Uncle Sam. And that is both hilarious and beautiful.