Friday, December 8, 2017

SHAME/SHAMELESS

I remember being much impressed, many years ago, on reading a passage in the late literary critic Leslie Fiedler's book, Freaks. Not so much "impressed", perhaps, as moved. It was one of those moments when what you're reading feels exactly right, like something you have long thought without having ever quite been able to put it into words, something you have profoundly experienced in your life, something that has the absolute ring of truth. He was writing about the feeling of freakishness he suspected to be the experience of all young children, even the very youngest, when we are quite literally freaks, pygmies amongst giants, when we can exercise no control over the functions of our body, shitting and pissing in our diapers, when the bodies we inhabit seem at once the totality of who we are and at the same time totally alien. It's in that experience I see the origins of shame.

For me, as I suspect for many, that sense of shame persisted somewhere deep in the unconscious mind. As a young child, I was acutely aware of the difference between my body and that inhabited by those around me. I remember very distinctly--and I have written about this--the time my father called me into his study and had me drop my pants for the doctor, who was there with him. I was born, he explained, with one testicle undropped, and he had asked the doctor to examine me for reassurance (doctors made house calls in those days!) The doctor probed my testicles, in front of the fireplace in my father's study, and pronounced me whole. I shrank into myself in shame. I was perhaps five years old.

As I grew older, that sense of shame about my body began to focus particularly on my genitals. Around the age of twelve--when it also happened that I was molested by a teacher at my all-boys' school--I could not help but notice the strange and wonderful behavior of my penis. I soon learned to masturbate, in secret. Of course, in secret. The intense pleasure I discovered I could experience in this way was tempered by the fact that I had learned somehow in my good Christian, middle-class upbringing, that it was a shameful, even sinful act, and one that must be conducted under the cover of the sheets, in darkness. None of us boys at my school would have dared to broach the subject unless accompanied by giggles and whispers.

It was at boys' school, too, a little later, that I learned even more acutely about body shame. I was plump (they called me "Fatty"). I felt small and shrunken around the crotch, especially when in the grip of fear, and I was always fearful of being seen naked. After sports, we had to shower together in the locker room--an experience so excruciatingly difficult for me that I learned to avoid all team sports and concentrate, instead, on cross-country running, knowing that I could be back early and out of the shower before the other boys were done with their lengthier cricket match or soccer game. I worried, painfully, about size. I envied all those who seemed better off than I in this regard and, in my shame, judged that to be every other boy.

I recall all this still vividly now, seventy (!) years later, in the context of a far different culture undergoing a sea change in attitudes about sexuality--especially male sexuality--because I know that the body shame I learned as a child affected my subsequent life in profound and sometimes painful ways. I have lived with the fear of being exposed, and not only bodily--though that, too; but also--because I have come to understand in my later years that body and mind are truly inseparable--in my professional and emotional life. I have struggled with the instinctive need to hide myself from view. Emotionally, I have often been seen as distant, aloof, in a way I would not have wanted to be. On the verge of professional "exposure"--i.e. success--in any area, I have often chosen to step back, away, and keep out of sight.

The flip side of shame, of course, is now a great, ugly blot on our cultural environment: that is, shamelessness. It's my belief that it originates in the same physical experience of the body, except that it manifests conversely (perversely?) as the need to show, to expose. I recall another episode from childhood, this one during World War II, when a cousin of mine, Donald (a fateful name, in retrospect!) came to visit us at the Rectory where I was brought up. I was, again, about five or six years old. Our nannies put us in the bath together. Donald was perfectly delighted with his penis, sticking it up out of the water and playing shipwreck against this "lighthouse"--albeit while our nannies had left us alone for a while. He urged me to join in the game, but I demurred. His shamelessness made me aware, even at that age, of my shame.

So now, in this 21st century, we are discovering just how many men are shameless, obsessed with the need to show their penis to unwilling others, or with the need to impress young girls with their erection, or with the compulsion to impose their masculinity on those less powerful than themselves. None of which is new. I know from the stories I have heard from countless other men that my own experience as the twelve-year old target of a pedophile was by no means rare. I know that the sense of shame was by no means restricted to myself. But at least now we are beginning to be able to talk about it--though the men's organization with which I am fortunate to have been long associated has been doing so for many years. It has been inspiring--and pioneering--work.

Be it noted that we usually tend to think of shame in negative ways, as though it were itself a shameful thing. And yet it's important to remind ourselves that, properly understood and brought to bear in all consciousness, shame can also be a powerful, necessary force for healthy and appropriate restraint. Those who lack it, the shameless ones, too often bring nothing but pain and grief into the lives of those around them. They may achieve remarkable success, but only at the cost of others. And their shamelessness is likely to spill over from business into personal relationships. We are currently witnessing this phenomenon in political leaders, entertainment giants, and powerful businessmen. Like cousin Donald, they can't resist playing lighthouse--and not only in the bath.

In view of the current flood of public revelations and exposures, perhaps, not only men in power, but all men will be required to hold themselves accountable for their actions in their sexual lives. If they do, I am sure that many of them will find they share with me the influence, for better or worse, of shame.

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