Lifestyle

The liberal shame game has turned us all into cowards

Late this summer, a nude statue of Donald Trump suddenly materialized in Union Square and other cities across the US. The statues were designed by artist Joshua Monroe under the alias “Ginger” and were overweight, with a small penis, lacking testicles. There was maybe a day of surprised giggling about it. And then, predictably, the moral opprobrium began, mostly from liberals.

Earnest essays entitled “Body-Shaming Donald Trump Isn’t an Effective Or Appropriate Way to Criticize Him” blanketed the web, accusing Monroe of not being very nice. “To lead people to laugh at someone’s body type and genitalia is unacceptable, no matter how terrible that person is,” explained one Bustle essay. Conservatives jumped into the fray, too, but mostly to accuse liberals of being hypocritical, body-shaming when it suited them politically.

The artist seemed confounded by all the criticism of his work, which was commissioned by the art collective called Indecline. “The criteria was he had to be naked. [Indecline] wanted it to be pretty lifelike,” Monroe told The Tab site. “They wanted him to be chubbier than he is in real life, not that we were fat-shaming him in any way, you know. He’s not that fat, and I’m not a skinny guy.”

No one suggested that perhaps there was something appealingly vulnerable about the statue, a reminder that underneath the clothing and big rhetoric, this was a person like any other.

Nor did anyone make the case that it is not now, nor has it ever been, the job of an artist to present work that is socially acceptable, politically correct and which makes important points in a thoughtful and comfortable manner.

But the Internet masses had spoken, declaring body shaming to be the ultimate social crime and the artist guilty, The End.

That same week in Breaking Shame News, some Ole Miss college students posted pictures of lavishly decorated dorms on social media. Cute, huh?

Absolutely not! It prompted the Slate essay, “Lavishly Decorated Ole Miss Dorm Rooms Offend Me,” which was quickly followed by the counter-response from Time, “Stop Shaming College Girls for Fancy Dorms.”

Not since Puritan New England has shame played such a big role in American culture. The only difference is that now, there is shame shaming — which has become the de facto response to pretty much any criticism or push-back.

‘Not since Puritan New England has shame played such a big role in American culture. The only difference is that now, there is shame shaming — which has become the de facto response to pretty much any criticism or push-back.’

At first, shame shaming came from a place of having been silenced for too long. Women, sick of being made to feel bad about their bodies or their sexual choices, spoke up and said: Enough. People who had experienced a traumatic event, like a sexual assault, spoke up and said: Nope, you’re not going to make me feel bad for how I dealt with this. Perhaps it materialized as a response to some of the outrageous trolling online, which is totally out of control.

But as with so many things that begin with the best intentions, shame shaming has become a boring way of shutting down any opinion that deviates from the cultural norm, which has increasingly come to mean the cultural liberal norm.

Calls of body shaming, slut shaming, victim shaming, mommy shaming, skinny shaming, food shaming, etc. abound on the Internet. If you’re a woman who takes issue with something another woman said, you aren’t simply disagreeing with her. You are “shaming” her.

In September, officials in East Liverpool, Ohio, posted a shocking photo of a little boy in the back seat of a stopped car, with two adults who had overdosed in the front seat. The photo is horrific, and it’s supposed to be: Officials posted it on Facebook to call attention to the dangers of the heroin epidemic. Right away, essays appeared criticizing the police for posting the photo: They were “drug shaming” the two adults — you know, the ones that had nearly hit a school bus.

In the culture of shame shaming, debate or healthy conversation no longer seems prized. You’re either right or wrong.

Part of this comes from the idea that anything that gives push-back is obviously negative and therefore a no-no.

This is largely due to the fact that negativity and snark are viewed as old school by millennials who tend to be overwhelmingly optimistic as a group, according to a 2014 Pew Research study that found that, despite high student debt and often grim professional prospects, the 18-to-34 crowd believes the country has its best days ahead of it.

Negative stuff doesn’t play well on the Internet. Try sharing something upsetting or depressing, and see how many fewer “Likes” you get.

“When we started, the prevailing wisdom was that snark ruled the Internet,” Eli Pariser, the CEO of uber-positive site Upworthy, told Time in a 2013 interview. “And we just had a really different sense of what works. You don’t want to be that guy at the party who’s crazy and angry and ranting in the corner.”

Indeed not, but that isn’t the only choice. You could also be the person having an open-minded conversation on the couch.

Shame plays a role in society: It holds people in line, prevents them from deviating from widely held norms. That’s what shame shaming is doing as well, except the norm it holds people to is one in which the only thing that’s not acceptable is criticism. And what ends up getting lost is where most of us reside: somewhere in the middle.