Telling All

Rousseau was bound in chains of sexual shame forged by the Christian tradition that sex is acceptable only for procreation. The authority for this warping of Western culture goes back to the iconic moment in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. The myth then says that “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” In falling from innocence into knowledge, the first thing Adam and Eve knew was their nakedness: suddenly they were vulnerable and felt the need to hide what most evidently made them different. The Bible doesn’t actually say that Adam and Eve felt shame about being naked or sexually exposed, or that humanity should be tarred with original sin. But myths are what we make of them: later Christian commentaries focused on Adam and Eve’s shameful disobedience, a shame so all-embracing it tinged their nakedness and sexuality as well.

If Adam and Eve did feel shame, most likely they blushed, which would have been only human — in fact, Darwin and Nietzsche (among others) have claimed that of all the animals, only humans blush. But the physiological changes that accompany all shamed responses, sexual or social, reveal more ancient evolutionary origins. Humans have a primal, gut reaction to shameful exposure. We freeze, our heartbeats slow then rapidly accelerate, we blush — all physiological reactions that point to shame as a survival mechanism like the fight-or-flight reflex. Many creatures, pinned by the gaze of another species and recognizing that their lives may be at stake, halt in their tracks and go on high-sensory alert.

Humans participate in this abrupt reframing as well, but they add an extra dimension of self-consciousness to it: “Shame is by nature recognition,” Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness. “I recognize that I am as the Other sees me.” Suddenly seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes and not liking what you see, sometimes to the point of self-loathing, is the essence of shame. And the fact that shame is intricately entwined with looking may make men, so influenced by the visual, more prone to the emotion.

The human self is fragile, so the trigger of shame doesn’t have to be dramatic or overtly hostile — just talking to adolescents can make them blush, and an offhand comment can redden an adult’s face. Thirty years ago, I entered an out-of-town restaurant owned by an acquaintance. He welcomed me and offered an ice-cold beer, evidently proud of being able to slake my thirst on a hot summer day. I don’t like beer that cold and, as I waited for it to warm, I told him how in Munich they sometimes serve cold beer with a thin glass tube of hot water, which you leave in until it’s exactly the temperature you want. “That’s interesting,” he murmured, and looked away.

I was mortified and blushed deeply: I saw myself as I imagined he saw me — insensitive and self-important. Although he may have dismissed my comment as a momentary faux pas, I still shudder at this memory — and that lingering self-disgust is also a sign of shame. Each recollection, even of such glancing exchanges, revives the original feeling, sometimes more intensely.

But once the shameful moment has passed, I want to be a better person — cleaner, purer, not stained by original sin. I want to work harder at building up a solid wall of good deeds to imprison and hide the worthless self. So there’s another side to those fig leaves — they don’t just hide genitals, they modestly divide the world into private and public. Keeping the private(s) hidden frees the public self to enter the world and work in it. The mortal curse of banishment from Eden was, after all, hard labour — Adam toiling to raise thorns and thistles while Eve must “labour” painfully to bring forth her offspring.

According to anthropologist David D. Gilmore in Manhood in the Making, a cross-cultural study of masculinity, making the world a better place — in effect, for Western cultures, making ourselves worthy of paradise, the heavenly Eden — is a crucial and almost universal aspect of being a “real man.” In most of the societies he studied, Gilmore found that manhood requires not only procreation and providing for and protecting one’s family, but also nurturing society. “Sacrifice and service to others” as a defining characteristic of manhood is “a fact most men acknowledge, privately,” notes Brown, citing Gilmore’s work, “but it is also a fact about which men have been shamed into silence.”

And no wonder. The shame of men is visible everywhere — real shame, not celebrity meltdown. Across North America, jobs — and male employment — are disappearing from what Faludi terms a “masculine” manufacturing-based economy, while job creation surges in the new “feminine” service economy. Dropout and failure rates for males in university are rising sharply, and graduates from medical and law schools are more likely to be female by a significant margin. Popular culture is saturated with negative male images that range from stupid and incompetent (Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin from Family Guy) to violent and misogynist (most slasher flicks and male rappers). Hard-boiled yet sympathetic men like the eponymous doctor on television’s House are a rare commodity. As for public service, forget the noble ideals that Gilmore documented — the manhood script for the average Western dude calls for bringing home the bacon (or part of it) followed by beer and the digital box.

In his essay on shame, Connor summarizes this trend by noting a wide-spread belief that “to be a man is in and of itself to fall short.” Connor himself says he’s “ashamed of the advantage of having been a man, and of its arrogant privilege and prospects,” not to mention masculine “stupidity and selfishness and certitude and pettiness.” Most of all, he’s ashamed of “the violence that is inseparable from being a man,” reflecting the common view that if only men would stop fighting, raping, and pillaging, we’d all be better off.

To plead that you’re not one of the rapers and pillagers doesn’t cut it either. Dropped Threads includes a horrific account of an extremely violent rape and, as I read it, I find part of me identifying with the rapist. Don’t get me wrong: I can’t imagine raping, but as a man I can’t divorce myself from the rapist entirely. I can’t make him not me and self-righteously condemn him as a raging pervert. The evidence of the man’s anger against women is undeniable, but the rapist’s desire is also a reflection, however distorted, of men’s blind desire to fuck their brains out whenever they can.