So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  Melissa glanced inscrutably at me.

  Jim was an engineer for an oil company.

  “I don’t want you guys to know . . .” Jim’s voice cracked. “. . . that I am a drug addict.”

  He made this declaration with such quiet power that it took the room aback.

  “They don’t drug-test you at your oil company?” someone asked Jim.

  “Yes, they do,” Jim replied.

  “You don’t flunk it?” asked Brad.

  “No,” said Jim. “I haven’t flunked it yet.”

  “How do you get around it?” asked Brad’s friend Thelma, whose secret was that she watches gay male porn.

  “I . . . don’t know,” Jim said.

  “What drugs are you addicted to?” Brad asked Jim.

  “I like . . . marijuana,” Jim said.

  There was a short silence. “How much do you smoke?” I asked him.

  “In three weeks I’ll smoke an ounce of marijuana,” said Jim.

  “Is that it?” screeched Emily.

  “I was once very attracted to a man I thought was a woman and ended up spending time with him and paying for that time,” Jim said.

  Everyone looked a little less underwhelmed at Jim’s new secret.

  Mary’s secret was how badly she was taking being rejected by her partner, Amanda. “I’m fifty and I’m alone,” Mary said. She looked at the floor. “I’ve lost myself.”

  Mary wasn’t just sitting around moping at home. It was worse than that. She was repeatedly telephoning Amanda. There was a time when Amanda would say to Mary, “One day I’ll marry you.” Now all Amanda was telling her was, “Stop calling me.”

  Brad told Mary to take the Hot Seat. He pointed to an empty chair.

  “What would you say to Amanda if she was sitting opposite you right now?” Brad asked her.

  “I’d tell her that I resent her for saying don’t contact me.”

  “Say it to her,” said Brad.

  “I resent you for saying, ‘Don’t call me,’” Mary said quietly into space.

  “See what it feels like to use an angry voice,” Brad said.

  “FUCK YOU,” Mary yelled at the empty chair. “I resent you for saying, ‘One day I’m going to marry you,’ and then you didn’t. So FUCK YOU. I resent you because you’re such a fucking bitch sometimes. I resent you for treating me like . . . I resent you for saying all those beautiful things and you took them all back . . .” Mary was sobbing.

  “Good,” Brad said. “When are you going to say this to her face?”

  Mary swallowed. “I’m wondering at what location . . .”

  “Call her up,” Brad told her. “Say, ‘It’s not a request. We’re either going to do this alone or in front of your whole goddamned office and you’ve got one day to make up your fucking mind.’”

  “Okay,” said Mary, quietly.

  “So, when?” Brad said.

  “By next weekend?” Mary said.

  “Good,” Brad said.

  Jack, a veterinarian sex addict, looked uneasy. “How do you put this approach in the context of people not calling the police?” he asked Brad.

  “You’re asking people to leave this session,” I agreed, “and do something to people who aren’t part of this. People must get hurt. The police must get called sometimes.”

  “People call the police sometimes.” Brad shrugged. “It takes twenty minutes for the police to get there. So you’ve got twenty minutes to complete all your anger.”

  “I can’t imagine this always works out well,” I said.

  “That’s because you’ve been brainwashed your entire life about all the terrible things that are going to happen,” Brad said. “Yeah, people get mad. People get upset. But people get over stuff. People worry about what happens in the first five seconds. But I’m concerned about the next five minutes. I’m committed to people staying with each other until they get over this.”

  This last part, Brad said, was critical. You remain with the person you’ve just been yelling at until the resentments fizzle. That’s how wounds heal.

  Vincent—the man who was regretting signing up for the course—suddenly announced, “I’m sorry. I’m leaving. This isn’t for me. I’m sorry.”

  “I resent you for saying you’re leaving,” said Melissa.

  “Okay,” said Vincent.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this resentment,” said Melissa.

  Wow, I thought. Give the man a break. She’s only just met him. “I resent you telling him that you’ll never get over the resentment of him leaving,” I told Melissa.

  “I appreciate you for sitting there listening to me,” Melissa said to Vincent.

  “Thank you,” Vincent said.

  “Shit or get off the pot, man,” said Jack the veterinarian sex addict. “I resent you for saying you’re leaving and I resent that you’re still here.”

  Vincent left.

  The day’s session ended. I said I hoped nobody minded but I was tired so I wasn’t going to have dinner with the group. I was just going to watch TV and send some e-mails instead.

  “I feel slighted,” said Brad.

  “Ach, no you don’t,” I said. Although I knew that he did.

  • • •

  There was a reason I needed to go to my room that I hadn’t explained to anyone. I had a work crisis. A story I’d been working on had turned chaotic, and my editor and I were at loggerheads, sending each other tense e-mails.

  It had sounded like an intriguing story at the beginning. There has been a tradition over the years of journalists wearing disguises to experience injustice firsthand. The pioneer was John Howard Griffin, who in 1959 stained his skin dark and spent six weeks hitchhiking as a black man through the segregated Deep South—a journey chronicled in his 1961 book Black Like Me. From time to time, editors have asked me to undertake similar journeys. After 9/11, a TV producer suggested I stain my own skin and move into a Muslim area of London. But it seemed to me like she basically wanted me to spy on Muslims, so I said no. This time, however, I’d been asked to disguise myself to experience a different injustice.

  “We want you to be a woman,” the editor had said. “We’ll work with a prosthetics artist to make you unrecognizable. We’ll get a movement coach to teach you how to walk like a woman.”

  “Women and men walk differently?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I never knew that,” I said. “This could be really interesting. As a man, I’m rarely stared at lasciviously. But as a woman, I might get stared at lasciviously a lot. How would that make me feel? And do women behave differently when there are no men around—like at women-only gyms and women-only saunas? I’m intrigued. I’ll do it.”

  —

  So I met with a prosthetics artist at a college in West London. She encased my face in alginate and took a cast. A prosthetic mask was made. She spent a couple of weeks manipulating it into womanly features. I slipped it over my face. I looked like a woman with a gigantic head. The editor called me in for a meeting.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry. We won’t use the prosthetic head. We can still make you look exactly like a woman.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “You’ll be amazed what a few hours with the movement coach will do,” she said.

  “You don’t think we’re in danger of relying too much on the movement coach?” I said. “It had been the prosthetics that had rather sold me on the idea.”

  “I promise you that we won’t let you out of this building unless you absolutely pass as a woman,” she said.

  —

  So, in an empty conference room in a quiet corner of the magazine’s offices, I dressed as a woman. Makeup was applied. I put on a wig and a dress and a padded bra. I spent hours under the tutelage of the movem
ent coach. Test photographs were taken. Finally, I left the conference room and walked toward the editor’s desk in the manner that the movement coach had instructed.

  She swallowed slightly when she saw me.

  “They’ve done an incredible job,” she said. She turned to the deputy editor. “Haven’t they done an amazing job?”

  The deputy editor swallowed slightly. “Yes,” she said.

  “You look exactly like a woman,” said the editor. “Now go outside and experience life as a woman.”

  “I don’t think I look like a woman,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” said the editor. “You look exactly like a woman.”

  “I don’t think I look anything like a woman,” I said.

  She peered at my tormented facial expression.

  I hesitated for a moment. Then I walked toward the exit. Sweat smudged my foundation. I glanced back over my shoulder at the editors. They were giving me encouraging looks and indicating the door. I felt sick, short of breath. My stomach muscles clenched.

  And then I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I turned, went back downstairs, and I put on my male clothes.

  —

  A week had passed and our relationship remained frosty. She felt I had prevaricated unprofessionally and was acting too sensitive. “Don’t over-think it, Jon,” she’d e-mailed me. “It’s just a fun feature. Shouldn’t be the cause of some sort of a midlife crisis.” I felt that the story’s original premise had fallen to pieces and the reason they were happy to send me out into the world looking nothing like a woman was that in our line of work the more humiliated a person is, the more viral the story tends to go. Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist—the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.

  Nobody must ever see those test pictures, I’d been thinking all week. Never.

  —

  Now, as I lay in my hotel room, I understood the truth of it. My terror of humiliation had closed a door. Great adventures that might have unfolded involving me dressed as a woman would never now unfold. I’d been constrained by the terror. It had blown me off course. Which, actually, meant that I was just like the vast majority of people. I knew this from studying the work of David Buss, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

  One day in the early 2000s Buss was at a cocktail party when the wife of a friend began flirting with another man in front of everyone: “She was a striking woman,” Buss later wrote. “She looked at her husband derisively and made a derogatory remark about the way he looked, then turned right back to her flirtatious conversation.”

  Buss’s friend stomped outside, where Buss found him fuming, saying he felt humiliated and wanted to kill his wife: “I had no doubt that he would do it. In fact, he was so wild with rage, such a transformed man, he seemed capable of killing any living thing within an arm’s reach. I became frightened for my own life.”

  Buss’s friend didn’t kill his wife. He calmed down. But the incident shook Buss up. Which was why he decided to carry out an experiment. He asked five thousand people a question: Had they ever fantasized about killing someone?

  “Nothing,” as Buss later wrote in his book The Murderer Next Door, “prepared me for the outpouring of murderous thoughts.”

  It turned out from his survey that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women had experienced “at least one vivid fantasy of killing someone.” There was the man who imagined “hiring an explosives specialist” to blow his boss up in his car, the woman who wanted to “break every bone” in her partner’s body, “starting with his fingers and toes, then slowly making my way to larger ones.” There was a bludgeoning with a baseball bat, a strangling followed by a beheading, a stabbing during sex. Some people were set on fire. One man was exposed to killer bees.

  “Murderers are waiting,” Buss’s book bleakly concludes. “They are watching. They are all around us.”

  Buss’s findings deeply distressed him. But I saw them as good news. Surely fantasizing about killing someone and then not doing it is a way we teach ourselves to be moral. So Buss’s conclusions seemed silly to me. But there was something different about his study that I found extraordinary. It was something that—as Buss’s research assistant Joshua Duntley e-mailed me—“we did not code for specifically.” It was the part where Buss asked them what had stimulated their murderous thoughts.

  There was the boy who daydreamed about kidnapping his schoolmate, “breaking both his legs so he couldn’t run, beating him until his insides were a bloody pulp, then I’d tie him to a table and drip acid onto his forehead.” What had the schoolmate done to him? “He ‘accidentally’ dropped his books on my head and all his friends had a good laugh.” There was the office worker who imagined “tampering with my boss’s car brakes so he’d have a braking failure on the motorway.” Why? “He had given me the impression that I was a real loser. He would mock me in front of other people. I felt humiliated.”

  And on it went. Almost none of the murderous fantasies were dreamed up in response to actual danger—stalker ex-boyfriends, etc. They were all about the horror of humiliation. Brad Blanton was right. Shame internalized can lead to agony. It can lead to Jonah Lehrer. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

  And so there in my room I decided that on day two of Brad’s course I would go for it. I would let the shame out. I would be Max Mosley. I would be radically honest.

  • • •

  On day two of Brad’s course, Brad asked me in front of the group if I’d like to take the Hot Seat, given that I’d been so quiet on day one.

  I cleared my throat. Everyone was smiling expectantly at me as if I were the start of a good television program.

  I hesitated.

  “Actually, I won’t,” I said.

  The expectant smiles turned quizzical.

  “The truth is,” I explained, “I don’t think my problems are as bad as everyone else’s problems in the room. Plus, I don’t like conflict.”

  I clarified that I wasn’t against conflict in a weird way: I quite enjoy watching other people being in conflict. If I notice two people yelling at each other on the street, I would often stop at a distance and have a look. But it just wasn’t my thing to participate in conflict.

  “So I don’t want people to think I’m anti–Hot Seat,” I concluded. “They’ve been my favorite parts of the course so far. I find the lectures in between them quite boring but the Hot Seats are great.”

  “So you want there to be a Hot Seat but you don’t want to be the one to get in it?” said Brad’s friend Thelma.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I say do a Hot Seat right now, go ahead and get in it,” Thelma said.

  “No, no,” I said again. “I’m honestly more comfortable watching other people do it.”

  “CHICKEN SHIT!” Thelma yelled. “I call CHICKEN SHIT! If you get a chance to jump on Jon, do.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “But seriously, I’ve got nothing that’s so pressing for me to be in the Hot Seat. I don’t want an awkward silence and I don’t want to dredge something up. I’d be faking it. I just think other people here have got more issues than I do.”

  “BULLSHIT!” yelled Thelma.

  “YOU’RE AN ARROGANT CONDESCENDING BASTARD!” said Brad.

  “I don’t think I said anything condescending,” I said, surprised.

  “‘You people need it and I don’t,’” said Brad, impersonating me.

  “I actually really resent you for saying that,” said Jack, the veterinarian with the sex addiction. “It was FUCKING condescending. I also resent that you’re sitting there fiddling with that fucking phone constantly, which I find extremely distracting. I RESENT YOU FOR HOLDING THE PHONE!”

  “Can I say something about the phone . . . ?” I sa
id.

  “We don’t give a fuck what your reason is,” said Brad. “We’re going to resent you whether you explain it or not.”

  “That’s not how conversations work,” I said.

  “Jon, do you have a resentment you want to share about anyone in this room?” said Melissa, hopefully.

  I paused. “No,” I said.

  “I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT YOU’RE A BULLSHIT ARTIST AND EVERYTHING YOU’RE SAYING IS BULLSHIT,” yelled Brad.

  “RIGHT,” I screeched. “I resent YOU”—I glared at Jack—“for saying I’m condescending. I’m NOT condescending. I was basing my opinion that your problems are worse than mine ENTIRELY on the things you’ve all SAID IN THIS ROOM. And I resent YOU”—I looked at Thelma—“for acting like Brad’s stooge, like his gang member. There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people. You swamped me with a tidal wave of Brad’s ideology.”

  “THAT’S A STORY YOU’VE MADE UP ABOUT ME!” shouted Thelma. “Yeah? He wants to tell me, ‘FUCKING BACK OFF,’ but he’s afraid of the conflict! So his mind kicks in!”

  “I resent you for repeatedly yelling ‘Chicken shit’ and ‘Bullshit’ at me because . . .” I said.

  “Not ‘because,’” said Thelma. “That’s interpretive.”

  I stared openmouthed at Thelma. She was COACHING me? In fact—it dawned on me—none of the yelling was a break from their therapeutic milieu. It was Radical Honesty. It works wonders for some of Brad’s clients. But it wasn’t working wonders for me. I was beginning to feel intensely rageful.

  “Do you resent me for telling you what to say?” said Thelma.

  “Yes, I fucking do,” I yelled. “I massively fucking resent you for telling me what to say.”

  “Poor little thing,” said Brad. “We’re so sorry we hurt your tender little feelings. Okay!” Brad clapped his hands together. “Lunch! I hate to abandon you, Jon, but I’m going to leave you cooking.”

  The group stood up and began drifting away.

  They were breaking for lunch?