by Jon Ronson
I sighed.
“Do you feel empathy?” I asked him.
“Yes!” he said. “The motive of most of the main things I’ve done in my life is feeling sorry for people. And the psychiatrist never met me. He just did it from the outside.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re a sociopath,” I said.
“Phew!” said Max.
“Anyway,” I said, “a psychologist once told me that if you’re worried you may be a sociopath that means you aren’t one.”
“Thanks, Ron, another phew,” Max replied. He paused. “Jon,” he said, “I meant Jon.”
“More proof you’re not a sociopath, because sociopaths wouldn’t care about calling me Ron,” I said.
“Another phew!” said Max.
• • •
It was getting dark by the time I left Max’s house. We both felt we hadn’t quite managed to solve the mystery, so we agreed to keep thinking about it.
“Oh, by the way,” I said, on my way out. “Have you heard of an S&M place in America called Kink? I think I’ve got an invitation to visit them.”
“Kink?” said Max. His eyes widened. “That is the place! I’ve only seen it on the Internet. They’ve got machines. They’ve got electrics. They’ve got water. You name it, they’ve got it. I’m quite envious!”
“Exciting!” I said.
—
My invitation to Kink.com had come about after I’d mentioned on Twitter that I was writing a book on public shaming. One of my followers—his name is Conner Habib—asked me if I was going to meet people who derive sexual pleasure from being publicly shamed.
“No!” I replied. “That hadn’t crossed my mind at all.”
He said that as it happened he was a gay porn star and if I wanted to know more about his work I should google him. I did and immediately saw many close-ups of his anus. I e-mailed him to ask how he managed to do that kind of work without feeling embarrassed.
“I do think there’s lots to learn from porn stars about how not to be embarrassed or feel vulnerable,” he e-mailed back. He added that a lot of sex industry people go on to become hospice workers: “They’re not freaked out by the body, so they can help people transition through illness and death. I’m not sure what would humiliate me at this point. If you want to talk at length about this, I’m open to it. Just don’t make me seem any goofier than I already am. Maybe that’s what could humiliate a porn star—a Jon Ronson essay?”
I frowned.
—
Conner’s e-mails got me interested in journeying into the porn world. Was it really populated by people who had learned how to be immune to shame? It suddenly seemed like a good talent to have.
He put me in touch with a famous porn impresario—Princess Donna Dolore of Kink.com studios. We swapped e-mails. “Growing up I was ashamed of everything,” she wrote, “and at a certain point I realized that if I was open with the world about the things that embarrassed me they no longer held any weight! I felt set free!” She added that she always derives her porn scenarios from this formula. She imagines circumstances that would mortify her, “like being bound naked on a street with everybody looking at you,” and enacts them with like-minded porn actors, robbing them of their horror.
—
Donna and I arranged to have dinner in Los Angeles. That morning I e-mailed her: “See you tonight at 7 p.m.!”
At 5:40 p.m. I e-mailed her again, “Don’t forget we’re supposed to be meeting in an hour and twenty minutes!”
“Sure!” she replied.
I arrived at the restaurant at 6:50 p.m. Two hours and ten minutes later, still sitting there, I checked her Twitter feed. Her last message, written four hours earlier, read: “Somebody please tell me what the fuck I am supposed to do at 7 p.m.! Why the fuck don’t I write this shit down?!?”
I trudged miserably back to my hotel. If keeping people waiting in restaurants for hours is what it’s like to live in a post-shame world, I thought, give me a bit of shame.
At midnight Donna e-mailed me: “FUCK! I’m SO sorry.”
“That’s FINE!” I e-mailed back.
“There’s a public disgrace tomorrow if you want to come,” she e-mailed.
• • •
It was midnight outside a sports bar in the San Fernando Valley. From the front, the place looked dark and empty—all shuttered up. But Donna had told me to go around the back to the fire door behind the bins. When Max had told me how impressive Kink.com was, he didn’t mean the sports bar. Kink.com headquarters is a giant, ornate 1914 armory in San Francisco, equipped with all sorts of dungeon and torture equipment. I knocked on the fire door. A security guard ticked me off a list.
I scanned the barroom. There were twenty people in there—middle-aged men sitting alone, some young couples. Everyone looked nervous. A man walked over to me.
“I’m Shylar,” he said. “Shylar Cobi.”
“Are you a porn person?” I asked him.
“Twenty-three years,” he said. “It’s all I know.”
He had a sweet, melancholy face. He reminded me of Droopy.
I asked him a bit about his life. He said he didn’t just work with Donna. He was a producer for hire, averaging fifty porn shoots a year. Which meant he had a thousand credits in all, including—I later discovered on IMDb—Orgy University, Wet Sweaty Boobs, and My Slutty Friends.
“So what’s the plan for tonight?” I asked him.
Shylar shrugged. “Same as always. They fuck, he finishes, we clean up, everyone goes home.”
He gently squeezed my arm to make sure I was okay. He wasn’t the only one. Various members of the production crew kept doing it to me all night—rubbing my back, squeezing my arm. I suppose, being tweedy and owl-like, I just don’t look like the sort of person who normally hangs around extreme porn shoots, and I think everyone wanted to ensure that I was not feeling intimidated or about to faint. It was sweet. Porn professionals were being so nice and considerate toward me that it was almost as if I were the person about to have his genitals electrocuted. But it wasn’t to be my genitals. It was to be the genitals of the porn actor Jodi Taylor, who was sitting in the corner of the bar discussing logistics with Princess Donna, who now stood up, hushed everyone, and made a speech about what was expected of us.
“So,” she began. “The name of the site is Public Disgrace. It’s a site about public humiliation. You guys are all just people drinking and having a good time, and you have no idea that we’re going to be turning up at this bar. When we come in, you’re all invited to participate to a certain extent. You can grope the model, assuming you have clean hands and short-filed fingernails. We have nail clippers and nail files if anyone thinks they’re going to need them. You can smack her ass, but this is not about you showing us how hard you can smack someone. I don’t want to see anyone take full swings. Sometimes people try and show off with their spanking. I’m sure you guys can all spank very, very hard, but I don’t want to see it. Other things you can do. You can spit on her body. You can pour your drinks on her. You can pull her hair. You can gently smack her in the face. But try not to be too obnoxious. You are totally welcome to shout things out and verbally degrade her. That is encouraged. But just don’t be that guy.” She summarized: “So. Don’t get shitfaced, don’t fist her ass, enjoy.”
Donna and Jodi Taylor disappeared to a corridor outside, where Donna attached a ball and chain to Jodi. Donna gave a signal to the cameraman. He pressed record. And it began.
—
The drinkers feigned surprise at the sight of Donna pulling a shrieking Jodi Taylor into the bar. “What IS going on?” said a man in a beanie hat. He slammed down his drink in “outrage.”
Donna ripped off Jodi Taylor’s clothes and attached electrodes to her genitals.
“What are you DOING?” said the man. He seemed to be the only crowd member daring enoug
h to improvise dialogue or simulate emotions of any sort.
“It’s electricity,” Donna said. “Do you want to shock her?”
“Do I want to SHOCK her?” he said. “I just came in to get a drink. Oh. Okay.”
Donna handed him the remote control. He pressed the button. Nothing happened.
“Turn it off and turn it on again,” said Donna. He did. Then he pressed the button. Jodi Taylor screamed.
(Later, during a break from filming, a few crowd members expressed doubt that there really was electricity coursing through the pads into Jodi Taylor’s genitals, so one of them placed the pad against her hand and pressed the button and shrieked. Later still, I got an e-mail from Jodi Taylor: “Obviously if something like public disgrace happened to me in real life, it’d be extremely intense, horrifying and awful. But that’s the beauty of porn. You can actually do these crazy things without actually doing them. It’s all make-believe. It’s pure fantasy and a fantasy is never humiliating or scary. It’s awesome. Princess Donna is all about making the PORN GIRL’S fantasy come alive far more than the fantasy of the people viewing it. Only with her can you have a fantasy as taboo as gangbang or public disgrace and actually get to live it out while being completely safe and comfortable.”)
Shylar Cobi had told me that the crowd was composed of friends and friends of friends, with one exception. A hired porn actor was mingling among us. And now he emerged and started having sex with Jodi Taylor. At this, everyone became a bit bolder, if still slightly stilted. “Put ice on her tooth,” a man shouted. Someone poured beer over Jodi Taylor’s head. I tried to maintain a respectful distance, but from time to time, when needing to ensure that I was accurately chronicling the minutiae of it, I think I drifted into shot. And so, if you are a Public Disgrace viewer and the erotic ambience was ruined for you by the sudden emergence of a bespectacled man peering in close and writing things in a notepad, I’m sorry.
Then they finished and cleaned up, and everyone went home. Later I spent a little time with Donna. I told her I thought she’d definitely created a more mindful working environment than most regular offices. There were no bullying bosses stalking around shaming the employees. “Are other corners of the porn industry more frightening and exploitative?” I asked her. “And that’s why everyone here was making a special effort?”
Donna nodded but said she didn’t want to talk about other parts of the porn industry. She wanted to talk about what she was trying to achieve with Public Disgrace. “America is a very puritanical place,” she said. “If I can help one person feel less freakish and alone because of what they like, then I’ll be a success. But I know I’ve already reached more people than that.”
• • •
A few weeks passed. And then I received an interesting e-mail from Max Mosley. Like me, he’d been thinking a lot about what it was about him that had helped him to stave off even the most modest public shaming. And now, he wrote, he thought he had the answer. It was simply that he had refused to feel ashamed.
“As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.”
I reread Max’s e-mail. Could that be it? Does a shaming only work if the shamee plays his or her part in it by feeling ashamed? There was no doubt that Jonah, and Justine too, had been having intense conversations with their shame. Whereas Max was just refusing to engage with his at all. I wondered: Was unashamedness something that some people just had? Or was it something that could be taught?
And that was how I discovered a man teaching a course in how to refuse to feel ashamed.
Eight
The Shame-Eradication Workshop
Twelve Americans—strangers to one another—sat in a circle in a room in the JW Marriott hotel in Chicago. There were buttoned-down, preppy-looking businessmen and businesswomen, a young Burning Man–type drifter couple, a man with a Willie Nelson ponytail and deep lines in his face. In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face, he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.
Now he stirred. “To begin,” he said, “I want you to tell us something that you don’t want us to know.”
• • •
A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you’re permanently concerned about what other people think of you.”
It was a few months earlier, and Brad Blanton and I were talking on Skype. He was telling me about how, as a psychotherapist, he had come to understand how so many of us “live our lives constantly in fear of being exposed or being judged as immoral or not good enough.”
But Brad had invented a way for us to eradicate those feelings, he told me. His method was called “Radical Honesty.”
[Brad Blanton] says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation.
—A. J. JACOBS, “I THINK YOU’RE FAT,” Esquire, JULY 24, 2007
Brad’s thinking was that shame grows when we internalize shame. Just look at the frantically evasive Jonah. Whereas look at Max Mosley. Brad’s favorite animal was a dog. A dog doesn’t lie. A dog doesn’t feel shame. A dog lives in the moment. Max Mosley was like a dog. We should be like dogs. And our first step toward being like dogs was to reveal to the group something about ourselves that we really didn’t want people to know.
—
By coincidence, a friend of mine, the writer and broadcaster Starlee Kine, took Brad’s course a few years ago for a book she was writing. I met Starlee before I flew to Chicago. I told her not to tell me what to expect—I wanted to be surprised—but she did tell me the first part. She said it always begins with the participants’ being asked to reveal a secret.
“With my group,” Starlee told me, “the first man said that his secret was that he hadn’t paid taxes in ten years. Everyone nodded and looked disappointed that his secret wasn’t so sensational. Then the next man said that his secret was that he had once murdered a man. He was in a truck with a man, and he punched him in his head and threw him out, and the guy was dead, and another car ran him over. And he didn’t go to jail and he never told anyone.”
“What did Brad Blanton say?” I asked her.
“He said, ‘Next. Great.’ So then it got to the next woman. She said, ‘Oh! My secrets are so boring! I suppose I can talk about how I have sex with my cat.’ Then the murderer raised his hand and said, ‘Excuse me. I’d like to add something to my secret. I’d like to add that I also have sex with my cat.’”
Starlee had found Brad’s course crazy. I probably would have too had I not been seasoned in the destruction of Jonah and Justine and the salvation of Max.
—
“Well,” began a woman called Melissa, sitting opposite me in the circle. Melissa was a successful lawyer. But her passion was sadomasochistic sex. “Humiliation is my biggest turn-on,” she said. She has even built herself her own private dungeon. But Melissa’s sex dungeon wasn’t her secret. Her secret is that she earned more than $550,000 last year and felt ashamed to have earned so much.
Later, when I recounted this to Starlee, she explained to me that Melissa is actually a regular at Brad’s workshops. She’s Brad’s protégée.
“Melissa tells everyone about her dungeon,” Starlee said. “How you respond to it is her way of judging how enlightened you are.”
Vincent sat next to Melissa. His secret was that he was beginning to regret signing up for Brad’s course. “It was a snap decision and $500 is lot
of money for me,” he said. “I was going to spend it on visiting my girlfriend in Thailand.”
“Has he paid in full?” Brad asked Melissa.
“Only the $150 deposit,” Melissa replied.
“Get his money,” Brad said to Melissa.
Brad was making the radically honest statement that he was more concerned about getting the $350 Vincent owed him than assuring Vincent that he’d made a good decision signing up for the course.
“Can I pay you what I owe you in the break?” Vincent asked.
Brad shot Vincent a suspicious glance.
Emily spoke next. Her secret was that she sells marijuana for a living.
“Like by the ounce?” someone asked her.
“By the pound,” she replied. “I charge about $3,400 a pound.”
“Are you worried about being caught?” I asked her.
“No,” she said.
“We’re very discreet,” Emily’s boyfriend, Mario, told the room.
Mario’s secret was that he sometimes tells Emily he thinks she’s fat.
“You’re not fat,” I said to Emily.
Mario’s other secret is “I use my lucid dreams as opportunities to rape women. I find the first girl that’s around and I do whatever I want. I have my way with her.”
“Can I be the star of your next dream?” said Melissa.
I had a headache. “Does anyone have any headache tablets?” I asked the room. Melissa reached into her pocket and pulled out a little baggie filled with loose pills of different shapes and colors. She picked out two and handed them to me. I swallowed them.
“Thank you,” I said. “I have no idea what kind of pills you just gave me. It actually crossed my mind that you might have just given me a date rape drug.”
Wow, what a good feeling! I thought. I thought it so I said it, with no possibility of negative consequences!
