Conservatives regularly overestimate the beneficial effects of shame. Shame provokes response in the form of impulse, not long term planning. A person who is ashamed isn't going to think, "I'd better get a degree" or "I'd better get married," they're going to think in the short term about what they can do to rectify their sense of self-worth.
How do you see people--men in particular--act when they're ashamed? You rarely see them do something like get married or get a fantastic job; usually they're going to hurt or exploit someone, make them feel as low as they do--this is the lesson learned by the shamed from the shamer, regardless of the lesson the shamer thinks they're teaching the shamed.
There's something weird about the way conservatives approach social problems like out of wedlock birth or poverty, as if the people with such problems glean some kind of orgasmic pleasure for struggling for cash, or raising a child as a single parent. These things are hard enough without shame, and while I agree with Dreher and Peggy Noonan that what "you applaud, you encourage," I'm very skeptical about the idea that shame can produce productive behavior. Dreher's argument assumes that the people in question aren't already ashamed, or have failed somehow to internalize society's larger values about family. I generally find that the opposite is true, they've internalized them to a fault. It's one thing to encourage marriage through positive reinforcement, it's another entirely to punish people for being unmarried and think that has a beneficial effect on society.
Serwer is right that shame makes a hard lot harder. But I don't think he is right about the value of shame. Without shame, what are you left with? It's accepting that you have no way to regulate peoples' behavior within the social network short of brute force or bribery.
It is true that people who are ashamed often do not behave well. But they often behave badly precisely because they are trying to deflect their shame. People do a lot of things to avoid being shamed. Why do small towns have lower rates of crime, and lesser antisocial behaviors like cutting people off in traffic or queue jumping, than big cities? Are people in small towns more inherently virtuous? Or are they afraid of what the neighbors will think?I have unashamedly moved in with a boyfriend, and am still not ashamed. But if we think people should marry, and shouldn't cohabit, than shame is a much better way to get there than giving people stupid marriage classes, paying them to get married, or making it illegal for unmarried people to rent an apartment.
Unlike those other things, the fear of shame triggers a deep, probably pre-verbal, instinctive part of our brain. Think about a time when you were publicly caught doing something you shouldn't have--your heart rate increases, the back of your neck crawls with the beginnings of a blush, you instinctively look away from wherever your eyes were just focused. No one has this sort of immediate and uncontrollable physical reaction to the prospect of a tax deduction a year or more hence.
That's why shame is a more powerful counterweight to, say, having unprotected sex in a mad moment, or moving in with your boyfriend, than less punitive measures. It's a more powerful counterweight than the distant, fuzzy knowledge that babies are sometimes expensive and tend to scream a lot. It works because it hurts. And pain is nature's way of saying, "Don't do that!!!"
The problem is that for the percentage of people who ignore social strictures and do something that is pleasurable in the short term while producing bad long term results, such as knocking over a liquor store, shame makes things even worse: you're in prison, and everyone's mean to you about being in prison. The problem is that if you don't stigmatize being in prison, or God forbid make it cool and authentic, then other people won't mind going to prison so much, and more kids will a) do something bad and b) screw up their own lives in the process.
Now, I'm prepared to mount a defense of living together out of wedlock (I'd better be, hadn't I?) I'm prepared to defend parents who have children out of wedlock from shaming, provided they care for them. I'm prepared to argue that our drug laws are a bigger problem than our drug dealers. But there are things that are shameful, like having a baby you know you can't care for, or paying yourself a lavish bonus out of taxpayer-provided funds to bail out your crappy, insolvent bank. Society, and most of the potential offenders, would be better off if we made those things more psychologically costly to even contemplate.
Per keeping the upside to shame and eliminating the downside to it as noted, that's what going to confession is supposed to do.
Megan writes: "Without shame, what are you left with? It's accepting that you have no way to regulate peoples' behavior within the social network short of brute force or bribery."
To argue that shame is not an effective social deterrent for undesirable behavior is akin to arguing that respect is not an effective social incentive for desirable behavior.
Humans are status-conscious creatures, and the vast majority of a day's work, outside of meeting basic needs, is aimed at improving or preserving one's status.
Calling someone "shameless" (or "sin vergueza" in Spanish) is still pretty frank speaking. We value a capacity to feel ashamed.
Serwer is proceeding from a false assumption. Shame isn't about goading people into productive behavior. It's about punishing people for socially damaging behavior.
Shacking up used to be considered shameful, because before birth control it meant out-of-wedlock births, and when the US was less wealthy society simply couldn't afford the consequences. As the situation changed, so did the pressure to conform.
Staash,
Wow! That first part was beautifully succinct.
The problem here is that we are not fully differentiating between shame and shame avoidance, which are two different things, as behavior modifiers. Shame avoidance may be of some social value as a deterrent for undesirable behavior that will cause shame, but shame once incurred is not. Instead, quite arguably, shame once incurred becomes the basis for more undesirable behavior, which is what I think Adam Serwer is talking about.
Shame as a deterrent may discourage some people from engaging in an undesirable behavior, but the unintended consequence is that the shame visited upon those people who are, for whatever reason, not effectively deterred (not to mention the shame-avoidance efforts these people may engage in), causes more problems. If you're going to evaluate the effectiveness of shame as a deterrent, you also have to own up to its externalities.
All that having been said, I don't buy the idea that deterrents in general (and shame in particular) are better motivators for than positive reinforcement. Anyone who's trained animals (including me) will tell you that punishment is far less effective than positive reinforcement in getting results -- and that punishment as a training tool, for what little limited effectiveness it may have, can often have all sorts of undesirable (and hard to fix) consequences. Why do you think it's any different with people?
Serwer barks up the wrong tree. The value of shame/stigma isn't what it causes in the offender afterwards. As with most punishment, the value is preventative: fear (beforehand) of being shamed/stigmatized causes one to think. And Megan is quite right that the very visceral nature of this particular fear is important.
As for unashamedly living out-of-wedlock, it's been great for me and m'lady going on 22 years.
tsotha writes: "Shame isn't about goading people into productive behavior. It's about punishing people for socially damaging behavior."
Moreover, the purpose of shame is much more concerned with preventing others from repeating the shamed individual's behavior than trying to reform the shamed individual. If it were not, why would we bother shaming a shameless individual? Why would certain types of shame have an excommunicative effect? Serwer is looking at the issue from the wrong perspective.
tsotha continues: "Shacking up used to be considered shameful, because before birth control it meant out-of-wedlock births, and when the US was less wealthy society simply couldn't afford the consequences. As the situation changed, so did the pressure to conform."
So then this particular taboo is just a function of wealth? Why then did it still apply to the Victorian aristocracy? Why does it still apply to wealthy Muslims?
Serwer is focusing on people who flaut the rules and get busted by the shame. Yes, their lot is hard. But the problem is you can't study behavior that didn't happen. The effect of shame as a deterrent can be huge but invisible. Why don't we have thousands of IVF Octuplet welfare mothers instead of only one pathbreaking one? Common sense and shame together probably account for most of the reason.
It seems to me Serwer is watching too many Hollywood movies. It's their rule that shamed people - yes, men in particular - will always hurt or exploit someone. But is it really so?
Shame and social stigma are also about how other people will respond to the same behavior. If there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, then the next person can do it, too...because it's not shameful. Shame is a deterrent to others.
Praise and blame are the central moral tools for alterning behavior in a desirable direction. The idea that shame is always bad is a leftover ideal from the 60/70's countercultural movement. It's also anathema to the self-esteem movement, which places self-esteem above any particular reason for having it. People like Wayne Dyer wrote extensively about how silly the idea of shame is. I suspect there is a strong ideological divide on this issue.
Be authentic!
Shame is just a tool of the conforming masses to make you into, um, a productive, er, well behaved... oh forget it. Rebel!
The value of shame/stigma isn't what it causes in the offender afterwards. As with most punishment, the value is preventative: fear (beforehand) of being shamed/stigmatized causes one to think.
The value may be preventative, but the effects it has on the offender afterwards (and the persons around him or her) are far from irrelevant. Shame causes people to engage in all sorts of behaviors that cause harm to themselves and others, and it impairs a person's ability to deal rationally with the situation at hand. If sex out of wedlock is shameful, a person who has engaged in it may feel motivated to lie about whether it was consensual. If pregnancy out of wedlock is shameful, the pregnant woman may feel motivated to avoid prenatal care, terminate the pregnancy, abandon the baby upon birth, what have you. These are only some examples. If you try, you can probably think of more.
Another thought: societal shame is different than media shame or political/legal shame.
Those small town folks who don't commit as many crimes or social faux pas do so because they're worried about what their neighbors might think, not what the town newspaper might print or the mayor might say in his next speech.
In the more macro context, our media-circus environment turns shame into celebrity. Look at what happened when Barack Obama tried to "shame" Joe the Plumber. Or the media shame heaped upon the IVF octuplet woman. When does her TV reality show debut?
For societal shame to be preventative, it has to occur naturally, not be the result of some political speech, law, or media campaign.
Shame can work when there are a lot of viable alternatives to the bad behavior you want to deter. Wealthy students can be shamed into studying more, and employees with free choice about how to do their jobs can be shamed into doing them in a more customer-friendly way.
What's bad is shaming people for things they can't help -- physical disabilities, coming from poor families etc. It's no good shaming a student because he can't afford books.
In my opinion, our society is woefully short on the first kind of shame. We don't judge people nearly enough in situations when they have free choice of how to behave and choose to behave badly.
But we have far too much of the second kind of shame. That's the kind that makes people lash out, because they know the criticism is unjust.
Single parenthood, like most other issues related to adult poverty, is a tricky case because it falls in between the categories. A lot of things have to go wrong for someone to fail completely at life... some of them under the control of the individual, and some of them not. I doubt there's a single intervention that would fix all of those things. But shame related to specific bad behaviors (drugs, for example) might still have a place.
I'm still waiting to see some indicator (beyond media circus crap like the octuplet pregnancy) that a lack of shame is causing an increase in social problems, or that an increase in shame is going to fix them. Does anyone have any studies? Or are we simply going on about this like a bunch of old biddies talking about how none of this would have happened back in the day when people still had the fear of god in 'em?
The economy only works if everyone is to some degree or another homo economicas. That means that for the most part people feel the obligation to work hard, pay their debts, and act in honest fashion in dealing with people. Governments can destroy that ethos by not rewarding people for such behavior. This is what happens in many third world countries. If you live in a country where what tribe you are born in or what class you were born to determines your ability to own land or improve yourself and the only way to get ahead is through crime or being a part of government corruption, you are not going to work very hard at honest labor and when you do, you will not see very much in return.
But societies can also destroy the ethos. You can see this in many inner city areas in the US. The message sent out in the 1960s was that all manual labor was demeaning and for suckers. When the culture doesn't encourage work, education and achievment, the culture shockingly will not achieve much. That is what hardcore Libertarians don't get. If you really has a society with no mores or shame, what happens when a critical mass of people say screw it I don't want to work I just want to hang out or it is okay to steal? Someone has to make the trains run on time.
"I'm still waiting to see some indicator (beyond media circus crap like the octuplet pregnancy) that a lack of shame is causing an increase in social problems, or that an increase in shame is going to fix them."
Go to an inner city school where few parents encourage their kids to get an education. Then go to a Jewish neighborhood where anyone's kid who doesn't get into an Ivy League school is considered a failure and compare how each group of students does. That is shame and stigma. In some places in this country flunking out of school is not considered to be a problem. In other's failing to get a 4.5 GPA in AP classes is considered a shame and stigma. The success of each group of students varies accordingly.
Well, reading all that it sounds to me like the dispute is over what people ought to regard as shameful, not whether or not people should be shamed. The reason people like Rod Dreher are useless is because they want to use shame in the old-fashioned way, to push people to engage in a social convention (marriage) that we don't all agree has the utility that Dreher seems to think it does. Not incidentally this, goes hand in hand with the old trick that cultural conservatives enjoy, of blaming the poor and the unfortunate for their own problems; if their problems are their fault, then shaming them is the most appropriate solution, correct? And again not incidentally, this means the rest of us are free from any obligation to help these people except in the most mean-spirited way, by making them feel bad about themselves.
"paying yourself a lavish bonus out of taxpayer-provided funds to bail out your crappy, insolvent bank"
Does anyone here think that any amount of shame would prevent the kinds of people paying themselves lavish bonuses out of insolvent banks with taxpayer money from doing so?
It has its limits.
John --
We seem to be finding out!
Shame provokes response in the form of impulse, not long term planning.
In this short sentence, Serwer simultaneously sees and is blinded by the light. Yes, shame can shape impulse behavior, which is exactly where it is needed most. It is a gratification instinct (i.e. the desire for status and social approval), and therefore it can balance other gratification instincts pulling in a different direction at a time and place where logic and reason have no sway.
"Not incidentally this, goes hand in hand with the old trick that cultural conservatives enjoy, of blaming the poor and the unfortunate for their own problems;"
So the poor and unfortuneate are never to blame for their problems? Is it not possible that some people are poor because they have chosent o engage in stupid destructive behaviors? Yes, some people are poor due to bad luck, but not all of them. Given that fact, doesn't it make sense to help the poor but at the same time shame the ones who are poor because of stupid decisions so that once they are on their feet, they won't be poor again?
Megan, I hope you actually do write a post defending living together out of marriage. I think it would be very interesting.
But this all presupposes that politicians can shame people. Many of the drink/drive ads and anti-drug campaigns appear to be a set of disconnected old people attempting to inflict their morality on the youth. You can only shame people who agree you have some moral authority to inflict said shame. I would suggest that virtually no messages from any western government fit this model.
"Does anyone here think that any amount of shame would prevent the kinds of people paying themselves lavish bonuses out of insolvent banks with taxpayer money from doing so?"
Depends on the shame. Yeah, that is a lot of money so it would take a lot of shame. But what if those people were really exiled from society. What if no one would talk to them or give them a job or so much as sit by them at the Opera. Yeah, they would have the money but it would be a pretty crappy life. Look at OJ Simpson. He was able to hide most of his money from the Goldmans and walk free, but he still had a lousy life after the trial. I think it is possible to shame people and make an example of them even in this case.
"Many of the drink/drive ads and anti-drug campaigns appear to be a set of disconnected old people attempting to inflict their morality on the youth. You can only shame people who agree you have some moral authority to inflict said shame. I would suggest that virtually no messages from any western government fit this model."
there is a limit to how many people you can shame. IN order for shame to work, the behavior must be out of the norm. The problem with the drug and drunk driving campaigns is that they try to shame behavior that large numbers of people engage in. Since anyone who has a beer and drives can get a DUI, the stigma attached to it is a lot lower than it used to be. It is the same with drugs. No one cares that Micheal Phelps smoked pot because he is an otherwise productive person and did something that millions of other people do. If in contrast they only arrested people for DUI when they had a really high BAH or arrested people for drug use when they were degenerate addicts, the shaming effect of such arrests would be much greater.
What about the shame of holding your friends to a lower standard than those you disagree with?
What about that shame of throwing the paleos under the bus for doing the same thing Arnold Kling did?
Megan, living together while unmarried is called "shacking up." As Orwell noted, corruption of society begins with corruption of language.
If people don't like the word "shame," perhaps we can use "social expectations." Those that violate social expectations tend to be mocked. If those specific expectations are good things, this is positive. If the specific expectations are bad things, it is negative -- the rebel might be a real hero in some cases.
(Of course, all bets are off if the person has no choice. No fair mocking people who are born with one leg, even if the usual expectation is two.)
So, which social expectations are good, and which are bad? We can probably argue this question for a long time.
But this all presupposes that politicians can shame people
The thing is, our society has mostly abandoned moral judgment for legal judgment.
The mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, was recently revealed to have had a sexual relationship with somebody less than half his age. Most of the media commentary focused on whether or not his lover was 17 or 18 when they began having sex (they met when he was 17 but claim to have delayed actual sex until after his birthday).
The distinction has legal consequences, but frankly, does it have any moral consequences at all? Should Adams be any less ashamed for banging somebody he was supposed to be mentoring just because he managed to avoid committing an actual crime?
Benard Spock,
Shacking up. I like that. What it also means is that Megan and or her b/f can dump the other one without having to go to court when something better comes along. I think the term used involve free milk and a cow.
It seems to me that the part that is missing is that it doesn't acknowledge the possibility of modifying our own behavior when we see someone else being shamed. If I see drunk drivers being forced to put dayglo bumper stickers on their cars proclaiming a DUI, or prostitution johns having their pix in the paper, or shoplifters being forced to publicly apologize - perhaps these kinds of things are deterrents.
Yes, but you undermine your own point. Shame and stigmatization is all about incentives. You can't simultaneously stigmatize behavior and reward (or at least not gravely punish) people for engaging in it.
Rod Dreher seems to think that what we need to do is go around making everybody who shacks up feel bad about themselves, and doubly bad if they have kids. But nobody in their right mind-even Dreher-thinks we should go back to the day when "illegitimate" children couldn't inherit.
Anyway, Dreher misses the point (as usual.) He wants us to shame people into getting married, as if merely being married will make all the social ills he talks about go away. That's foolish. Our biggest concern should be whether or not people can provide for their kids, and they don't need to be married to do that. He's not even aiming at the right problem.
There are three social control mechanisms, not two.
Adam Serwer conflates shame and guilt.
Guilt is best because it influences behavior under more circumstances.
Shame is the next best, but it doesn't attach bad feelings to the deed, only to its discovery.
Fear is no good without a high probability of punishment. Only we peasants would get the that. Our masters in government would go merrily on their ways.
Our competitive advantage has been that we could trust people. We trusted them to do the right thing when nobody is looking. That seems to be changing.
Xanthippas,
Your complaint is not with shame per say but with whether marriage is the type of behavior we should be shaming people into. There seems to be a lot of evidence that the quickest way out of poverty is to get married and the quickest way into poverty is to be an unwed parent. Given that, doesn't it make sense to shame men who father children out of wedlock and women who have them out of wedlock? Or maybe we are just too hung up on marriage. How about shaming people who have children but do not make a home with the person they concieved the children with?
Go to an inner city school where few parents encourage their kids to get an education. Then go to a Jewish neighborhood where anyone's kid who doesn't get into an Ivy League school is considered a failure and compare how each group of students does. That is shame and stigma.
Amazing. I live in a city where I've had the opportunity to meet, socialize with, and even help raise (in one case) kids who attended one of our many inner city schools, and I work with a bunch of educated Jewish guys. And somehow I haven't been able to figure out that the difference in fortunes between the kids I've known and the guys I work with is all about shame . . . Here I thought it might have had something to do with stuff like the fact the one Jewish guy's family owns half the car dealerships around here and could pay to send him, whereas the inner city school kids' parents haven't got a pot to piss in. How could I have been so wrong?
And dare I point out that lack of motivation and fecklessness aren't limited to the "inner city?" The only thing is that the repercussions are very different when the family has economic and social means, as opposed to when they do not. A poor parent's feckless kid ends up committing petty thievery and sucking down 40s on the stoop. A rich parent's feckless kid ends up, say, getting C's on a legacy enrollment at Yale, getting serial opportunities to mismanage a few vanity businesses despite his drinking problems, and then, well, you get the picture.
A cheap shot, perhaps, but I've seen pretty shameless behavior on the part of people whose families had the means to keep them from having to bear the brunt of it, and it didn't wreck them. I've also seen people who live on the edge make one mistake, and have that mistake start a whole domino-cascade of problems that they'll never get out of. Shame wasn't a factor either way.
"Amazing. I live in a city where I've had the opportunity to meet, socialize with, and even help raise (in one case) kids who attended one of our many inner city schools, and I work with a bunch of educated Jewish guys. And somehow I haven't been able to figure out that the difference in fortunes between the kids I've known and the guys I work with is all about shame . . . Here I thought it might have had something to do with stuff like the fact the one Jewish guy's family owns half the car dealerships around here and could pay to send him, whereas the inner city school kids' parents haven't got a pot to piss in. How could I have been so wrong?"
Some Jews don't have pots to piss in yet their kids do well in school. Asian immigrants of the last 25 years or so have many times been at the absolute bottom of the income scale, yet their kids dominate elite universities. Further, even wealthy African American kids don't do as well in school as their white and Asian counterparts. Why is that? It is because shame and culture matter more than money. So what if your friends owned car dealerships? I went to school with white kids who were millionaires and they were pot smoking morons whose parents had to buy their way into even low standard private colleges.
Nolo,
Yeah all those Jews are rich and own everything, isn't that right? Your friends probably support Israel to. Bastards.
I find it so odd that a society that has basically abdicted making any moral judgments about much of anything beyond the most depraved and violent crimes is routinely surprised to see moral decline apparent across the board in all aspects of life.
Shame was used effectively for centuries as a way to mold and control social behavior, and lo and behold, social behavior was molded and controlled accordingly.
But, it may be too late for shame to make a comeback. In a country that turns the most idiotic, craven, dirtbag into a celebrity with his or her own reality show and a six figure book deal, it's a pretty huge task.
JD writes: "Megan, I hope you actually do write a post defending living together out of marriage."
Megan, I really, really hope you don't. The less I know about your personal life, the happier I am.
Why then did it still apply to the Victorian aristocracy? Why does it still apply to wealthy Muslims?
Because they are male dominated cultures that demand a woman's purity. There isn't any shame with men shacking up in these societies, just women. Secondly, when women are forced to marry in their teens there's not a whole lot of time to shack up anyways.
Moreover, the purpose of shame is much more concerned with preventing others from repeating the shamed individual's behavior than trying to reform the shamed individual.
That's what I meant. There's really no point in heaping punishment on people who already recognize they made a mistake except to deter others.
So then this particular taboo is just a function of wealth? Why then did it still apply to the Victorian aristocracy? Why does it still apply to wealthy Muslims?
Wealth and birth control, I think. Not that having your children out of wedlock even in the US doesn't impose a social cost. It does. But it's a cost we can afford as long as a substantial percentage of people get married before they have children. Also, in earlier times the people around you - family, church, and community - would be the ones expected to pay that social cost, so there was probably an element of resentment. Today we spread that cost over millions of people.
The Victorians didn't have birth control. Their sexual culture was itself a reaction to the consequences of looser mores of the Elizabethan era. As for the wealthy in Muslim countries today, well, polygamous systems offer huge incentives to maintain a strict morality if you're wealthy enough to have multiple wives.
There isn't any shame with men shacking up in these societies, just women.
It seems to me that Mr. Wickham was not a popular guy in his time, at least among the respectable gentry and officer class.
Megan, I wish you happiness, love and happy home.
I spent a summer as a teenager working at Plimoth Plantation, where I did an afternoon in the public stocks on assignment for a renaissance fair on the Boston Common.
Made me think that such punishments are actually quite effective for immediate impulse behaviors; beyond that, I'm not sure it's so effective. The potential of shame certainly didn't mitigate Madoff or derivative traders. It doesn't seem to bother infomercial hucksters, diet-pill manufacturers, or fortune tellers.
And shame never works for child molesters and pornographers and spouse abusers.
Nolo - in the inner city you're ridiculed for "acting white" and studying. At significantly Jewish schools (high or low end... there are lots of poor Jews, especially Orthodox ones) "my son the doctor" is revered and people wonder what you did wrong if your kid goes to UCLA instead of Harvard, Brandeis, or Columbia, never mind someplace like ASU or an SEC school.
A great example in culture making the difference is the attainment of different South Asian ethnic groups as immigrants in North America. They're all determinedly "other". When they first came over in large numbers they were generally indistinguishable to the populace and faced the same prejudices, were dismissed for bad accents, strange religions, smelly food and are all brown (exact shade varies within and between groups, but not enough for most white people to know the differences, just as most white people have problems differentiating between various East Asian names and looks). Despite the similar treatment, different groups have different levels of success, with Tamils doing noticeably worse than others.
Culture matters. There are crappy Anglo cultures - South Boston, Hillbilly, Chav, and there are good Anglo cultures. Good ones shame failure and reward success, bad ones shame success (or its habits) and reward the habits of failure. The 13 year old dad Alfie isn't going to Eton, and his family is flaunting his (and their) failures for money.
In other words, yes the poor DO deserve it. Government programs reward their bad decisions, like having kids at 13, and their neighbors think nothing too bad of them. We need to get them to want to do better, by shaming them, taking away benefits for bad behavior, and doing other hard hearted things. But that's because I care about the poor people (and kids) and seeing them succeed, while leftists like you only care about how government programs make you feel, not what they actually do for their supposed beneficiaries. International aid is built on the same conceit, as are UN blue helmet interventions that are mainly run for the benefit of child pornographers and rapists.
Byrk writes: "Because they are male dominated cultures that demand a woman's purity. There isn't any shame with men shacking up in these societies, just women."
Well, there you go! Legitimacy is the cultural artifact of the sexist, cruel patriarchy. Illegitimacy is a symbol of female empowerment.
Nolo - if you eliminate cultural differences, including expectations and its consequences -- shame and guilt -- to account for group differences, what are your left with to explain different group outcomes after controlling for wealth? The KKK? A conspiracy?
You're cornering yourself into a place you're not meaning to (i.e., genetic explanations).
Because they are male dominated cultures that demand a woman's purity.
I don't think this is really true. The Vitorians (who had a female queen, lest we forget) were no more "male dominated" than the Elizabethans. I think it has more to do with successful procreation strategies.
Swami, no I'm not. For one, I've not gotten anywhere near eliminating all cultural differences. I'm talking about the social utility of shame. For another, I'm pointing out that wealth and social collateral make very big differences. As I thought I said, people of all social stations make mistakes, ignore conventions, and flout the expectations of others. Some have the social and economic collateral to protect them from the consequences. Some don't. There's your difference -- now how does that force me into the corner of genetic explanations?
IIRC the expression was either (for the cohabitating unmarried couple) “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” or (for the married couple) “why go out for milk when you’ve got a cow at home.’ H/T MWC
John, you can stuff it with your cheap insinuation that I'm antisemitic, since you're the one attributing social characteristics to Jews as a group. I'm not. You brought up Jews and inner city kids as two separate groups to which you ascribed broad characterizations. I pointed out that my own personal experience is that each individual has his or her own story, and that family wealth can make a difference as to outcome. YOU then decided to insinuate that I'm saying Jews have all the wealth. You know what, that's going on in your head, I think, not mine.
Besides, you idiot, I'm Jewish. Probably explains why I am a leftist who, according to Bulging Bracket, cares more about how social programs make me "feel" than about the actual welfare of All Those Poor People. I'm sure it's in my genes.
Not really, most of the cultural conservatives focus their ire on behavior that they find destructive (e.g. premarital sex, substance abuse) rather than individuals. The business of assigning blame or making excuses because of one’s social-economic class is pretty much exclusively the province of social liberals.
Well, there you go! Legitimacy is the cultural artifact of the sexist, cruel patriarchy. Illegitimacy is a symbol of female empowerment.
Now there's an idea that has worked out soooooo well for women.
Megan, I hope you actually do write a post defending living together out of marriage. I think it would be very interesting.
Why, other than to obtain prurient details of Megan's personal life?
Seriously, non-marital cohabitation, at least for childless couples, in this day and age, is no more in need of a defense than the virtues of holding a steady job or donating to charity or spending time with your family is. The sexual revolution happened, and certainly the broad acceptance of non-marital cohabitation, which allows people to find out if they are compatible on all sorts of levels without forcing them into a legally binding and hard to sever relationship, is one of its unarguable improvements to our culture.
Nolo - kudos. My thoughts exactly.
And while there are good Anglo cultures and crappy Anglo cultures, one of the most destructive Anglo cultures around seems to have gotten itself entrenched on Wall Street, and, as many commentators seem to have noticed, its members appear to be absolutely impervious to shame when it comes to bonuses.
And when it comes to Jewish culture who needs antisemites when Madoff used his charitable connections to take everyone's money?
Our problem is not shaming the poor, it's figuring out how to shame the rich.
According to Giambattista Vico, my favorite philosopher, shame is the foundation of religion and civilization.
Why shouldn't shame be equally aportioned to whomever is deserving, rich or poor?
We don't want to shame people. That's closing the stable door after the horse is gone.
We want people to anticipate feeling guilt before they act, so that whether or not they anticipate discovery they refrain from bad behavior.
Not incidentally this, goes hand in hand with the old trick that cultural conservatives enjoy, of blaming the poor and the unfortunate for their own problems;
Sometimes people really do make their own misfortune - drugs and unwed parenthood are prime examples. The failure to recognize this is a blind spot people on the left have always had for reasons that elude me.
Morality serves a purpose - morality almost always lines up with what is good for society and/or the individual. It's not (only) about God - societies with very different ideas on the supernatural have very similar ideas about what constitutes moral behavior.
Nolo - in the inner city you're ridiculed for "acting white" and studying. At significantly Jewish schools (high or low end... there are lots of poor Jews, especially Orthodox ones) "my son the doctor" is revered and people wonder what you did wrong if your kid goes to UCLA instead of Harvard, Brandeis, or Columbia, never mind someplace like ASU or an SEC school.
Why are the low end Jews, especially Orthodox, with the right-thinking cultural attitude towards school still poor?
The sexual revolution happened, and certainly the broad acceptance of non-marital cohabitation, which allows people to find out if they are compatible on all sorts of levels without forcing them into a legally binding and hard to sever relationship, is one of its unarguable improvements to our culture.
Inarguable? No, I don't think so. There's definitely a societal cost, it's just not a cost we pay for every couple that cohabitates.
Should there be a difference between shame for doing something morally wrong and shame of doing something that with hindsight proves to be really stupid?
I'm not Catholic like Megan, so I'll leave the morality of shacking up to her, the Pope and God. I will say that from a pragmatic point of view it seems stupid for women to cohabitate while it is much more desirable for men. You have much less leverage in the relationship that a married women or your lover does.
As for political strategy and public policy, it is laughable that shameless politicians think they have any room to talk.
Inarguable? No, I don't think so. There's definitely a societal cost, it's just not a cost we pay for every couple that cohabitates.
Quite the contrary. Whether or not two unmarried childless people live together is completely irrelevant.
Indeed, you need to think about roommates. They cohabit, and nothing bad happens for society, right? (Or do you believe that no two unmarried people should ever share living space?)
Now, one night, the roommates take a liking to each other and one of them places his condom-sheathed penis inside the other's vagina. By your theory, that one act of physical contact alone must be the thing that causes massive harm to society. Simply rubbing two bodies together in a particular manner must cause some cosmic disruption in the universe, heretofore undetected.
Or maybe, more likely, that relationship continues to have no effect on the rest of society after the sex act, just as it did before.
I will say that from a pragmatic point of view it seems stupid for women to cohabitate while it is much more desirable for men. You have much less leverage in the relationship that a married women or your lover does.
Interestingly, smart, feminist women who are very likely to make informed choices about their personal lives totally disagree with this and tend to think that living together before marrying immensely benefits women in relationships. For your statement to be true, the most brilliant and informed women must be under some serious false consciousness.
By your theory, that one act of physical contact alone must be the thing that causes massive harm to society.
Not the act itself, but the trivialization of sex into nothing more than a source of physical gratification divorced from any notion of higher meaning or duty causes massive harm to society.
It's not cohabitation that's the problem, it's the elevation of narcissism into a guiding life principle. Cohabitation is both a symptom and a source of reinforcement for this problem (but not really by itself a cause).
A woman only gives up power in a non-marital sexual relationship if she would really rather have marriage and a traditional family set-up while the man would not. This is not always true. Plenty of men want to find wives and have children, and plenty of women have no interest in babies or quitting their jobs.
I will concede that it's bad policy for a woman who wants the traditional set-up to settle for anything less, unless she keeps matters on a temporary and reversible footing (no merging of finances) or unless the hall has been booked and the invitations ordered. Agreeing to cohabitate is not the way to get a reluctant man to pop the question sooner. But that's not always the goal.
(Same applies for a man, except the reluctant woman may be hesitating to say yes rather than propose. The rituals associated with marriage are more sex-specific than the desire to enter into it.)
The sexual revolution happened, and certainly the broad acceptance of non-marital cohabitation, which allows people to find out if they are compatible on all sorts of levels without forcing them into a legally binding and hard to sever relationship, is one of its unarguable improvements to our culture.
Well, that's certainly one of two ways to look at it. The other is that people should learn a fair bit about each other without the forced intimacy of shared habitat and inevitable risk of making babies, then commit to the relationship and learn to understand and work with the rest on the basis of the commitment. As a bonus, any offspring born under such circumstances are, statistically if nothing else, more likely to have their basic needs met and get a better starting position in their own adult lives.
This might be an odious thought to anyone who wants free milk, or who has degraded the sexual union to nothing but two organs rubbing together briefly and therefore extracts no further value from it, but inarguable, it is certainly not.
Quite the contrary. Whether or not two unmarried childless people live together is completely irrelevant.
Ah, yes, well the "childless" part is rub, so to speak. And that's what I meant by the cost not being paid for every couple. These sorts of arrangements do produce children more often than people who aren't living together. And people who are living together but are unmarried are less likely to stay together while the child is growing up.
We pay a huge social cost for fatherless children. Virtually every indicator of a healthy life is worse - criminal behavior, physical health, mental health, income, ability to maintain a stable relationship. You name it.
Of course you can find children of single parents who grew up to be Nobel physicists or business tycoons. But they are certainly less likely to become successful than kids from intact families.
Now, you could argue with birth control and abortion we shouldn't have this problem. But in fact we do.
By the way, I'm not saying cohabitation is all bad or that it's going to bring about the end of western civilization. This is just one of those cases where something that's probably good for most individuals turns out to be bad for the society at large. That's why I took issue with your use of the word "inarguable".
And shame never works for child molesters and pornographers and spouse abusers.
Actually, I quite doubt that. I think if society completely accepted these behaviors, you'd see a lot more of them, even if they remained illegal. Somehow I doubt it's only the threat of prosecution that stops people engaged in these activities from talking about it with their friends and family.
I remember when the drunk driving laws first got serious about 25 years ago. There was little social stigma attached to the activity, and there was more of a "poor old Bob got nabbed" attitude. The DUI rate was quite high despite substantial penalties.
Twenty years later, and admitting that you drove home drunk is going to get you only contempt from most of your family and peers. The penalties haven't changed much, but there's a *lot* less drunk driving occurring.
Interestingly, smart, feminist women who are very likely to make informed choices about their personal lives totally disagree with this and tend to think that living together before marrying immensely benefits women in relationships.
Fertility clinics are full of women who were oh-so-smart in their younger days.
It's not cohabitation that's the problem, it's the elevation of narcissism into a guiding life principle. Cohabitation is both a symptom and a source of reinforcement for this problem (but not really by itself a cause).
I don't see a problem with sex being "trivialized", if you mean that we have finally matured to the point where we treat bodies rubbing up against each other in a pleasurable fashion as bodies rubbing up against each other in a pleasurable fashion.
But that having been said, even if the "trivialization" of sex is a valid concern, I would think that CASUAL sex (as well as things like porn, prostitution, strip clubs, the use of sex in advertising, "hook-up" culture, etc.), is your problem, not cohabitation. Cohabitators, after all, are tying sex to a pretty meaningful act, living together (and all the financial, emotional, and personal interrelationships that arise from it).
Further, I should be clear that the sexual revolution simply brought into the open things that had always occurred. The relevant comparison is not between living together and marriage, but between living together and getting it on (likely unprotected) secretively in the back seat of a '57 Chevy so that the couple's parents would never find out. Which "trivializes" sex more?
The other is that people should learn a fair bit about each other without the forced intimacy of shared habitat and inevitable risk of making babies, then commit to the relationship and learn to understand and work with the rest on the basis of the commitment. As a bonus, any offspring born under such circumstances are, statistically if nothing else, more likely to have their basic needs met and get a better starting position in their own adult lives.
While your at it, why don't you bring back arranged marriages as well?
Oh, and by the way, offspring born in loveless marriages between people who got married too soon because their peers and parents disapprove of sex outside of marriages do not have it nearly as good as you claim. Meanwhile, lots of cohabitators use contraception (certainly more effectively than the folks who get married early) and prevent such pregnancies from occurring.
I've got February 28 in the boyfriend kills himself contest.
Shame IS alive and well.
But that having been said, even if the "trivialization" of sex is a valid concern, I would think that CASUAL sex (as well as things like porn, prostitution, strip clubs, the use of sex in advertising, "hook-up" culture, etc.), is your problem, not cohabitation.
Yes, that would be why I identified cohabitation as more a symptom than a cause.
I do regard, however, the discovery of "compatibility," which you brought up, as a similar symptom of excessive narcissism, and society's focus on "compatibility" over more important matters a cause. What makes a marriage successful (matching values and life goals) can be discovered without cohabitation, and the things one discovers through cohabitation are mostly frivolous and easily susceptible to negotiation and compromise between mature adults. To the extent that we make who picks up after whom a relationship breaker, we reveal our shallowness and the weakness of the underlying relationship.
I think shame can and does supplant governmental regulation in homogenous societies (e.g. many small towns). However, the shamers and the shamees have to share a basic framework in their value system.
Perhaps the big bankers belong to a homogenous community of elites who uniformly value excess, so they do not see anything shameful in extracting extravagant bonuses as their respective banks go under?
I am not sure how one could make shame hold the same deterrent value across this country as it appears to do in nations where the traditional sources of shame are so many centuries in the making, and so universally understood across their respective populations.
yew. it stinks here.
I lived with a man once. For four years. I'd known him for a year.
Then I married him. That was 29 years ago come June. 32 years together, and still happily (and proudly) counting.
My husband brings joy. I smile just thinking about him.
And I highly recommend the long-term thing, no matter the bonds of it. But I'm one of those flaming liberals who believe love and respect and trust are the bonds of marriage and family, not a church or law. Church and law are there for when the bonds break down and we need structure for civility.
Rob, I suspect that people universally capable of resolving those frivolous things through negotiation and compromise are not even a sizable minority in the populace. There is a nice poetic one-liner that very succinctly describes what those everyday problems do to a marriage. Unfortunately I cannot translate it from Russian without losing both brevity and the metaphoric quality.
Yet, here comes the original:
Семейная лодка разбилась о быт.
Oh, and by the way, offspring born in loveless marriages between people who got married too soon because their peers and parents disapprove of sex outside of marriages do not have it nearly as good as you claim.
Living together before marriage doesn't change the odds of divorce. It seems to have no effect whatsoever.
Meanwhile, lots of cohabitators use contraception (certainly more effectively than the folks who get married early) and prevent such pregnancies from occurring.
The young married couple may actually want children, you know.
And I highly recommend the long-term thing, no matter the bonds of it. But I'm one of those flaming liberals who believe love and respect and trust are the bonds of marriage and family, not a church or law. Church and law are there for when the bonds break down and we need structure for civility.
I don't know anyone who doesn't believe that, liberal or conservative, with the addition religious people tend to think God strengthens those "love and respect" bonds.
Congratulations on finally scoring, Megan. Maybe it will make you less of an insufferable dolt.
While your at it, why don't you bring back arranged marriages as well?
Tranny's gonna need a $900 rebuild after that shift.
What makes a marriage successful (matching values and life goals) can be discovered without cohabitation, and the things one discovers through cohabitation are mostly frivolous and easily susceptible to negotiation and compromise between mature adults.
Well, it's nice of you to say that women don't need to know if, e.g., their husband can actually bring them to orgasm before marrying them. I assume that sexual satisfaction is completely unimportant to you too-- NOT.
Tranny's gonna need a $900 rebuild after that shift.
No shift at all, amouse. The same logic that says that we should force young people to create bonds that they don't want to create and babies they don't want to have as the price of sexual activity would justify denying them even the choice of mates. If you want to stop short of that, you certainly haven't provided any reason to.
"Семейная лодка разбилась о быт."
The odds of having a happy relationship with an early 20th century Russian poet were pretty low (see Blok, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Akhmatova/Gumilev), byt notwithstanding.
"Well, it's nice of you to say that women don't need to know if, e.g., their husband can actually bring them to orgasm before marrying them. I assume that sexual satisfaction is completely unimportant to you too-- NOT."
At the risk of TMI, why is this such a major issue? All you need is patience and persistence and a desire to please, and all of these characteristics can be evaluated outside the boudoir. They come in pretty handy, too.
Amy:
Read Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique". Really. Everyone should read it. It turns out that when women just got married to the first guy they really came to like, they ended up in very unsatisfying marriages. Who knew? Sexual satisfaction was part of it, though I should note that they were dissatisfied in many other respects as well.
(Also, sex is a learned skill (where a person benefits from prior experience) as well as dependent on physical capabilities. It is also not one act but a spectrum of acts, from mild to kinky, some of which may be liked or desired by one partner but not desired or even loathed by the other. It also may, in some instances, encompass activities with third parties as well as toys and aids. Sexual compatibility is thus really, really important and is not something that people are going to be able to discover unless they have a nice, healthy, active sex life with the partner before marrying him or her.)
Seriously, a lot of these arguments have a heck of a lot of cultural amnesia behind them. Cohabitation became socially acceptable PRECISELY because a lot of people came to realize that it really did help to know a lot more about the person you were marrying than the old model allowed you to.
I might add as well that the parts of the country where cohabitation is frowned upon still have the highest rates of divorce, domestic violence, and single motherhood. The places where cohabitation is accepted have the lowest rates of those things.
At bottom, the sexual revolution is really a lot like Darwinism. While we can't PROVE religious beliefs about sex false in the same way Darwin proved the Genesis story to be BS, what we did is accumulate a heck of a lot of evidence that the traditional religious beliefs of Western societies were completely full of it when it came to sex. So societal mores eventually adapted to what we learned. It's understandable why conservatives don't like this-- conservatives don't like Darwin very much either, after all. But the sexual revolution was evidence-based, and just because enough time has passed that some folks have forgotten or never encountered the evidence that led to the shift doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Rob Lyman said:
Just what "higher meaning and duty" do you refer to? My cohabitrix and I were beyond the procreative stage when we joined forces; helping raise the children of her prior marriage seems meaning and duty enough. If our life-long commitment to each other and the children (and grandshildren, glory be!) is enshrined only in our hearts and wills but not the marriage register, are we guilty of a moral lapse? And is non-reprodictive sex automatically "narcissistic", or is there some test we can pass?
I might add as well that the parts of the country where cohabitation is frowned upon still have the highest rates of divorce, domestic violence, and single motherhood. The places where cohabitation is accepted have the lowest rates of those things.
I sure would like to see a cite for that.
Dilan Esper writes: "It is also not one act but a spectrum of acts, from mild to kinky, some of which may be liked or desired by one partner but not desired or even loathed by the other. It also may, in some instances, encompass activities with third parties as well as toys and aids. Sexual compatibility is thus really, really important and is not something that people are going to be able to discover unless they have a nice, healthy, active sex life with the partner before marrying him or her.)"
How does this prove sexual compatibility is "really, really important"? Important to whom? Important to what? Important why?
Staash:
If you don't know why, I am not sure I can help you.
... and is there no middle ground between having unsatisfying sex and indulging in your most debauched fantasies on a regular basis? If not, then the vast majority of us do not have "a nice" sex life and still manage to get by.
Well, except for the swinger/bathhouse crowd maybe, but how's that really working out for them?
Lastly, your implicit comparison of the shunning of fecalphilia to the shunning of Darwinism is quite a stretch.
Dilan Esper continues: "If you don't know why, I am not sure I can help you."
I'm asking you to contextualize your statement. This is not a ridiculous request.
Does it apply equally to all societies from the dawn of mankind? How would a society of people with "nice" sex lives (by your definition of "nice") be better of than a society without them?
Staash:
Sexual desire is a curious thing. It's very important to people, and indeed, even the religious traditions which were displaced by the sexual revolution admitted that it was very important to people.
And it isn't as simple as people desiring to put their penis in some suitable vagina, and vice-versa. It encompasses a lot of acts, from the straightforward to the bizarre.
You can crack jokes about fecalphilia, but seriously, would you want to be married to a fecalphilic (or someone else with a sexual fetish that you found similarly bizarre)? And how are you going to find that out without testing the waters before taking the swim?
Indeed, how many marriages break up because someone has some deep dark secret sexual desire that the other partner eventually discovers?
If you want to come back and say this stuff is really not as important as people think, I suppose you can do that, but you aren't going to change the minds of everyone who thinks it actually is important. If you want to come back and say that while yes, it is important, what one must do is channel all that desire into having missionary position vaginal intercourse with one person of the opposite sex for the rest of your life, not only will most people reject that but most therapists would say that this sort of thing would do great damage both to the marriage and to the psyche.
So I don't think there's any way around the fact that this stuff is very important, different people have very different desires and very different routes to satisfaction, and that our religious traditions were generated by people who didn't seem to understand the first thing about the diversity of sexual desires in the population, let alone how to approach it.
At bottom, the real problem isn't that people have diverse sexual desires, but that you want to label anyone who is the least bit heterodox in their sexual desires as the equivalent of a fecalphilic, or, as you put it, the "swinger / bathhouse crowd". In fact, a lot more hardship and grief is caused by those who are repressing their sexual desires in some dark place than those who find willing adult partners to safely and responsibly express them.
The problem is that if you don't stigmatize being in prison, or God forbid make it cool and authentic, then other people won't mind going to prison so much
Even if the prevailing popular culture somehow successfully de-stigmatized incarceration, even if it somehow made it alluring, there's still the tiny inconvenient fact that prison is an objectively nasty place. In a stigma-free fantasy world, people who know nothing of what prison's really like may not mind going there initially, but most will find out PDQ that it's not someplace they'll want to remain, unless they belong to that 0.00000001% segment of the population that enjoys a nice, coerced session of tossing someone else's salad. Or if they're the tossee, but that's a pretty slippery totem pole to climb.
Well, except for the swinger/bathhouse crowd maybe, but how's that really working out for them?
It's really quite fantastic, thanks for asking.
All this talk of shame and morals has me in a transgressive mood. I think I shall dine on fresh baby tonight.
So then this particular taboo is just a function of wealth? Why then did it still apply to the Victorian aristocracy? Why does it still apply to wealthy Muslims?
WHAT? And leave all that money potentially subject to court decisions? No, better tie it up properly in the time-honored fashion, being sure whose kid is whose.
Historically, you'll find the "shacking up" or as the old lady in me says, "living in sin" more or less reserved for the lower classes where there wasn't any money worth a lawyer's attention.
And...pssst...you don't have to "live in sin" to have premarital sex. There's shame for you, it pushes the undesirable activity underground, for good or ill. Doesn't necessarily eliminate it; the problem is *getting caught*.
Dilan Esper writes:
"You can crack jokes about fecalphilia, but seriously, would you want to be married to a fecalphilic (or someone else with a sexual fetish that you found similarly bizarre)? And how are you going to find that out without testing the waters before taking the swim?"
Do inclinations to fecalphiliac tendencies really make one a fecalphiliac? There's this amazing thing that separates humans from animals called "restraint". Is said quality the new taboo?
Dilan Esper continues:
"Indeed, how many marriages break up because someone has some deep dark secret sexual desire that the other partner eventually discovers?"
Given the Ted Haggard and Larry Craig imbroglios, my guess is "far less than you probably think."
Dilan Esper continues:
"If you want to come back and say this stuff is really not as important as people think, I suppose you can do that, but you aren't going to change the minds of everyone who thinks it actually is important."
Well, see, that's actually the problem here and the heart of our disagreement. You think that these "deep dark sexual desires" are a priori the cause of conjugal disharmony. I see them as a byproduct of the human tendency to think the grass is always greener. It's obviously situational, but in the vast majority of cases, it really isn't. Expectations like these are more often what causes people to make bad life decisions which further compound unhappiness.
You continue: "most therapists would say that this sort of thing would do great damage both to the marriage and to the psyche."
That's one of the weakest appeals to authority that I've ever seen on this blog. Therapy, as a business model, makes a lot more money from the chronically dissatisfied than the satisfied. Setting a client's expectations unrealistically high is the most important part of the con.
You continue:
"So I don't think there's any way around the fact that this stuff is very important, different people have very different desires and very different routes to satisfaction, and that our religious traditions were generated by people who didn't seem to understand the first thing about the diversity of sexual desires in the population, let alone how to approach it."
Really? My take on it is that the people who "generated religious traditions" knew quite a lot about "the diversity of sexual desires in the population." Your problem with it is that the decided to approach it as unimportant, which didn't exactly impede human progress for the last, say, 200,000 years.
Dilan Esper concludes: "In fact, a lot more hardship and grief is caused by those who are repressing their sexual desires in some dark place than those who find willing adult partners to safely and responsibly express them."
Your mistake is conflating the perceived hardship and grief of an individual human with that of society. This is what I was getting at with my original questions to you, and, coincidentally enough, is the same mistake Serwer makes regarding the social value of shame.
This whole conversation shows a profound lack of understanding of the working of an honor/ shame economy.
The issue is that we don't shame, its that we have multiple competing honor shame economies, and when people want to do something that is shameful in their current economy, they switch economies.
In a pluralistic society, shame isn't effective in a society wide effort. It just drives people to create new honor/shame economies. Watch "Napoleon Dynamite" to see this in action.
In a pluralistic society, shame isn't effective in a society wide effort. It just drives people to create new honor/shame economies.
That's an excellent point, wallyz.
In a pluralistic society, shame isn't effective in a society wide effort. It just drives people to create new honor/shame economies.
Exactly right! Indeed, some make it a point of honor to do and celebrate the very things that certain groups consider shameful! Construct any honor/shame economy and I will immediately summon its inverse. This is easy to do, when one is god in one's own mind, which anyone is perfectly capable of being.
Leaving my sex life aside, the snarkier commenters here are making heavy assumptions about tense. English. . . so tricky about tense . . .
Megan writes: "Leaving my sex life aside, the snarkier commenters here are making heavy assumptions about tense. English. . . so tricky about tense . . ."
I thought the lack of a possessive was far more interesting.
Everybody has gotten sidetracked. The issue is social pressure as an alternative to coercive (state)force as a way to influence behavior.
We shouldn't be ashamed to shame. We should be ashamed to point guns at people who engage in non-aggressive behavior that we don't agree with.
The Church Lady is preferable to Stalin.
He is looking at the people that shaming doesn't work on and claiming doesn't work.
The fact is that the vast majority of people that don't have kids out of wedlock or pursue college degrees do so, in part, to avoid the shame that would come with such decisions.
Conservatives may over estimate the effects of shame on the class of people that Serwer is talking about, but Serwer, in turn, is vastly under estimating the actual effects that shame has on the positive behaviors we actually see.
Isn't this Adam Smith's entire argument in The Theory of Moral Sentiments?
The problem with cohabitation is that one party is frequently going to be at a significant disadvantage in dissolution of the relationship, and, consequently, at a significant disadvantage in negotiating agreements within the relationship.
I worked in family law in Texas for 7 years. It sucked, to the extent that I often fantasized about being t-boned on the way to work so that I could spend the next week in the hospital rather than in the office. There were some valuable lessons learned there, though, which people discussing marriage as either an archaic, vestigial religious nothing or whatever are missing.
The law of comparative advantage is alive and well in every relationship, whether cohabitational or formalized by marriage. The longer two parties live together, whether informally or formally, the more likely they are to specialize in their production towards the household. This usually means that one party is maximizing their economic production, and the other is maximizing their domestic production. There are exceptions, of course, but very rare is the household where both parties make exactly the same income and have exactly the same responsibilities in the household.
Unfortunately for the informally cohabitive couple (or, more specifically, the "domestic specialist" in that relationship) there is no easy way to recoup their domestic contributions or "compensate" for their domestic specialization in the event of dissolution of the union. In a marriage, the states have developed a whole slate of rules and regulations for the orderly unwinding of a couple's joint property (so long as the relationship is formalized through marriage). Some states are more favorable to the domestic specialist, but in the end the set of rules and procedures is infinitely preferable to informal methods of property division as far as "fairness" is concerned, despite repeated comments in this thread that the legal procedures of ending a marriage makes marriage less desirable.
I believe they're referring to it as a "stimulus" bill.
How did he do that?
"Leaving my sex life aside, the snarkier commenters here are making heavy assumptions about tense. English. . . so tricky about tense . . . "
Is that crypto-elitist code for "I'm not living with my (ex)boyfriend anymore"?
You gotta love how she brings up a subject and then is shocked, shocked that someone won't let it go. It's like when a woman wears a blouse with a plunging neck-line and then gets upset when men stare at her breasts.
I thought the lack of a possessive was far more interesting.
LOL, I thought the same thing: "moved in with a boyfriend." Who talks like that?
"a boyfriend" could mean:
a) His girlfriend is starting to get suspicious of me.
b) One of several I have, but this particular one pays the rent.
c) I plan to upgrade someday but for now this one will do.
I love the English language.
God all you people are REALLY old. This is what we young-uns (yes I know English snobs) politely refer to as old people standing on their porch and yelling at kids to get off their lawn.
Yawn. Shame? Have you SEEN what passes for prestige in this country lately? Shame died with reality t.v. The world's not Leave it to Beaver.
Welcome to the 21st century. Come on over it's really not THAT scary to the rest of us.
I would argue that shame does not really factor that much in our society.
Shame is the guiding force in many oriental societies, especially Japan, as shame is something imposed by the community on the individual. The concept of "face" cannot function without shame.
But in western society, especially in the modern era, there is not a strong enough sense of community for shame to properly function. What we use instead of shame is guilt, which is imposed by an individual on themselves.
Unfortunately guilt is also linked with religion. As western society becomes more secular, the power of guilt fades. Fortunately sacred religion (i.e. Christianity) is often displaced by secular religion (i.e. environmentalism), which keeps guilt in play as a motivating force.
Yawn. Shame? Have you SEEN what passes for prestige in this country lately? Shame died with reality t.v. The world's not Leave it to Beaver.
Welcome to the 21st century. Come on over it's really not THAT scary to the rest of us.
Congratulations for getting The Most Clueless award! You seemed to have missed the entire point of the post.
James, BORING. Perhaps you are being chivalrous and think you are defending our girl. If so, that's hardly 21st century. If not, please try harder. We can overlook your poor writing if you actually attempt to express an original thought.
Shame is internal and derives more from a person's moral compass and the community that shapes it. "Shaming" another person is punishment at best, bullying at worst. The most likely individual outcome is resentment.
Let's put it this way; are "welfare moms" any more likely to get off welfare because Megan says they should be ashamed of themselves?
Missionaries are more effective than crusaders.
staash:
1. our society doesn't stand or fall on what anyone does with his or her genitals with another conaenting adult. the only thing unhealthy is your obsession woth what other people might be doing.
2. when people screw, they don't owe the rest of us any explanation or accounting. it's none of your business, even if you think it will cause jesus himself to strike us all down tomorrow.
3. the condemnation of homosexuality alone proves the bible is the word of ignorant men, not god. these people knew all about preserving patriarchy and subjugating women, but nothing about healthy sexuality.
"2. when people screw, they don't owe the rest of us any explanation or accounting. it's none of your business, even if you think it will cause jesus himself to strike us all down tomorrow."
I think that's rather apparently false. There are plenty of reasons that we as a society might have to object to two people screwing. Incest, for example, or age-related issues.
To use your example above, regarding two people that happen to be roommates and then have sexual relations. Let's imagine that these two people living together made the most economic sense. Then they "rubbed their genitals together," as you put it. And then, because of the complications attendant in that act, they couldn't room together anymore.
The sexual act creates many complications, among them jealousy, in human relationships. That's why we as a society don't condone people just having sex like shaking hands, because if everyone were screwing it would unnecessarily complicate relations within our society. When working in divorces, I worked on plenty of cases where the couple tried to treat sex as "rubbin genitals together," through open marriages or swinging, and they could never seem to get around all the attendant emotional baggage involved in screwing.
Dilan,
You're going to have to decide whether sex is just a sort of pleasant thing people like to do, like petting cats, or some dark and powerful life-altering force that makes or breaks marriages.
For my part, I think sex is indeed very powerful, which is precisely why it needs to be regulated and channeled into productive (or at least non-destructive) paths. People do stupid and despicable things for sex; they need to be urged not to.
However, I do not think sex is particularly important. I do not know how many orgasms my paternal grandmother had when she was young, but I do know she has struggled against severe depression for decades, and my grandfather has been their for her every step of the way. It is what is generally meant by the archaic, patriarchal, and strangely orgasm-free phrase "in sickness and in health." That is how a real man lives his life and honors his commitments. The "man" who abandons his wife because she doesn't go for nipple clamps and then tries to trump it up as some kind of desperate "need" is nothing but a contemptible adolescent.
I feel fairly confident that my wife will not greet me on my birthday with two horny yet obedient 19-year-olds. So in that sense, I suppose my deep, dark sexual needs are going unmet. But so what? I've gone without getting any for long periods before, and it's no fun, but I have much more serious issues to deal with. I try not to think with my little head.
You seem to, on the one hand, trivialize the responsibilities which sex imposes, to our partners, our children, and ourselves, preferring to say it's nothing more than good fun. On the other hand, you elevate the pleasure which sex gives to a central concern of human relationships. This combination--the flight from duty and the obsession with and insistence on gratification--is the very definition of narcissism. And it is indeed damaging to society, even if any given sex act on any given occasion is not.
The sexual revolution happened, and certainly the broad acceptance of non-marital cohabitation, which allows people to find out if they are compatible on all sorts of levels without forcing them into a legally binding and hard to sever relationship, is one of its unarguable improvements to our culture.
And yet, after few decades of practical experience with the idea, society has reintroduced legal and financial consequences to walking out on a defacto relationship.
I don't know American law, but in Australia a defacto partner can demand property and even alimony after a separation. And the legal tests for the "living together" being a "defacto marriage" become lower and lower all the time.
Why could that be?
Rob: "People do stupid and despicable things for sex; they need to be urged not to."
That's because we get a lot of utility from sex. High utility makes it important.
Incidentally, "try before you buy" mostly eliminates worries about the guy who abandons his wife because she doesn't go for nipple clamps. If she doesn't go for nipple clamps before marriage, you can bet she won't after.
(There is a separate problem with dishonest women who will go for nipple clamps before marriage, but not even a blowjob once the man is trapped. But that's a whole other discussion.)
Incidentally, "try before you buy" mostly eliminates worries about the guy who abandons his wife because she doesn't go for nipple clamps.
In theory and assuming sexual desire is static, yes. But 1) this is an appetite which grows with feeding, much like other intensely pleasurable activities such as cocaine, and 2) the "try before you buy" mentality elevates sex to the central concern of our relationships, which is ridiculous.
You can survive without sex, and you can also survive without your personal perversion-du-jour. If your partner is game, great, but if not, man up and deal.
Megan, congratulations. Don't give the nasty unwashed who snark and troll in this thread about your private life a second thought.
This is such an interesting discussion, about the different points of view Americans take about marriage. The heavyhandedness and wish for control and dominance of other people's life is simply astonishing. Where did the libertarianism of you guys go? Out the back door?
It's generally a bad idea to generalize about society by concentrating on the bottom rung. Those likely to behave anti-socially to engage in shame avoidance, and those that through chronically engage in bad decision making that accrues that shame are still a small percentage of society.
Its a dangerous game to tear down the social structure that hold up the rest of society to spare the feelings of those who are chronically poor decision makers. Its a game we've been playing for many years. The results are pretty clear- when being on welfare isn't stigmatized, many more people are on welfare. When having illegitimate children you can't hope to take care of is acceptable, MANY more such children will be born.
It is nearly universally true that those who argue against shame and humiliation as social deterrents do so *because* they recognize how very effective they are.
Rob: "You can survive without sex, and you can also survive without your personal perversion-du-jour. If your partner is game, great, but if not, man up and deal."
You can survive without love or affection too. Does that mean a loveless marriage is a good idea?
at bottom, the view of rob and others is that sex is so dangerous and special that us mere mortals can't be trusted to have it. of course 99.99 percent of sex acts pose no danger to others at all, and rob's view would deny to people a pleasure that they consider cental to their lives.
the rest of us must live in misery, apparently, so that rob's delicate sensitivities are not offended.
rob, seriously, get help. your life will be much better once you stop worrying about what other peole are doing with their private parts.
How do you see people--men in particular--act when they're ashamed?
Why the extra stab at men? I know plenty of sociopathic women who are beyond shame. Indeed, in today's world of entitlements, one could easily argue there is more socioptathic behavior by women than men.
Serwer states the modern male response to shame is to do "what they can do to rectify their sense of self-worth." This is an inversion of the social norms of the last several centuries of western civilization, wherein the goal of those exposed to the shame of their social peers was to redeem themselves in the opinion of those same peers that had shamed them.
Such ego-centric response to societal norms is ridiculous and deserves opprobrium from one and all.
Megan; You omitted one substitute for shame -- tax increases to regulate behavior. Here in New York, we may not shame some one for being overweight, but we may be paying taxes on Coke and other soft drinks to pay for the health costs of obesity.
The use of shame to deter unwanted behavior has worked astoundingly well in the case of the uber-taboo of racism.
In America there there is nothing more shameful than being called a racist. Does it work? Well, many modern feminists are afraid to criticize honor killings, lest they be called racists. Seems like its working to me.
Shame has lots its power because there are too many "judgment is bad" types running about.
Think about it. Call out someone for being lazy, selfish, immoral, etc., and you'll have a phalanx of people saying "judge not, lest ye be judged" and "he without sin cast the first stone" (usually these people aren't religious and don't know where in the Bible to find those quotes and don't know the context of them, let alone the dozens of quotes that, taken out of context as well, contradict them).
Moral relativism, by another name.
Transport us back in history, say, to the pre-1960s in any society, and sucha thought would ahve been ludicrous. Once upon a time, people understood that societies were built upon people choosing social mores to castigate, because a community was cohesive when behavorial patterns were ingrained socially.
Nowadays, we have these strange birds arguing that you can't call out someone's lifestyle. It's preposterous.
Ironically, these "don't judge" types do have judgments they pass: racism/sexism/dislike of homosexuals is always "bad" in their minds, and those who do them are bad. Except calling them on this hypocrisy is likely to get you called a racist. Moral relativism, it seems, only applies to non-left-wing social points of view.
I long ago realized this was just an attempt by these don't judge types to institute their own moral code through coercion, propaganda, and the msot ridiculous forms of sophistry since Roman mothers let their babies die on hilltops but weren't really killing them.
Megan's situation benefits from this because all those who would have clucked at her co-habitation have been shut up by this new code.
Howdy Megan and Folks
I would like to draw a line between shame and embarrassment, knowing that it's going to be fuzzy. I feel embarrassed when I think I've done something foolish or I think others believe I've done something foolish. I feel shamed when I know that I have done something selfishly harmful, or even cruel. I feel even more shame when I know others know that I've done selfishly harmful things. I have done shameful things and embarrassing things. My knowledge of my own shame has brought me to repentance and improved behavior. My knowledge of embarrassment has usually guided me to more appropriate behavior, but it has sometimes stopped me from doing what I believe was right.
rob, seriously, get help.
Dilan, seriously, read what I wrote and respond to it rather than making up an imaginary Rob.
I'm not against sex. I'm against narcissism, self-absorption, and destructive behavior. I don't mind when other people have a drink or two, but I would certainly object to the elevation of alcoholism to a secular sacrament.
"I do not know how many orgasms my paternal grandmother had when she was young, but I do know she has struggled against severe depression for decades, and my grandfather has been their for her every step of the way."
Seems _there_ might be a step or two missing, if you catch my drift. Either way, God bless her, as I understand is the phrase some are using state-side.
Whoa!
Seems to be an assumption widely shared here that shaming is a game played by conservatives with regard to concepts of morality or anti-social behavior.
What about the shaming that goes on in liberal venues with regard to non-PC behavior? What about a professor who pronounces the one overtly Christian kid in class a "fascist bastard"?
I lived thirty years in the deep indigo blue area around Palo Alto, CA. For the past five, I've been in oh-so crimson North Texas. The folks around here seem downright libertine in their tolerance by contrast.
Someone earlier mentioned arranged marriages. I have been married three times. I am very happy with my current wife of over 25 years. This marriage was sort of arranged—by us—by long distance through a reading club. However, I would have probably been happy with someone my family had picked for me from the beginning. They could not possibly have done a worse job than I did picking my first two wives. I think there is something good to be said for arranged marriages.
I'm not against sex. I'm against narcissism, self-absorption, and destructive behavior.
It is not that you are against sex per se. It's that you think that sex is so socially harmful on the one hand, and so unimportant and unproductive, on the other hand, that you want to interfere with anyone else's ability to enjoy it in a way that meets your disapproval.
And those beliefs are transparently false. Millions of times a day, genitals come in contact with people in pleasurable ways, and nothing bad happens to the world as a result. So, given that you are espousing obviously and transparently false beliefs, I have to think it's because you have some sort of prurient obsession with what other people are doing.
Instead of trying to stop people from enjoying themselves in ways that bother you (which is futile anyway), you'd do much better to stop worrying about what other people are doing. That will make your life much happier, trust me.
Um, Dilan, where have I "tried" to stop anyone from doing anything? Where have I said that sex is "social harmful"? Where have I suggested that genitals coming in contact causes bad things to happen? Those are your absurd misinterpretations of what I wrote.
Exploitive and abusive relationships are socially harmful. Children imprudently conceived and improperly raised are directly harmed directly and contribute to social harms. Narcissistic behavior (and it's nasty big brother, sociopathy) is socially harmful.
All of the above harms are promoted by a culture that views orgasms as central to well-being and restraint as "repression." When it comes to patently false beliefs, how about your belief that genitals not coming into contact in the particular way one wishes (aka "repression") is socially harmful? Everyday, millions of people don't cheat on their spouses or act out their weird rape fantasies, and nothing bad happens.
In most contexts, we understand that the proper response to compulsiveness is restraint. AA does not encourage alcoholics to indulge their deep, dark desires. Rather, they are enjoined to repress them, because the consequences of repression are far better than indulgence. Ditto for cokeheads, kleptomaniacs, compuslive overeaters, and gambling addicts.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying sex, even weird adult-baby breastfeeding sex, if that's your bag, any more than there's something wrong with enjoying a drink or two or a trip to Vegas. But we keep our other appetites in their proper place by exercising restraint and understanding that we can't always get what we want. Sex is no different
I saw Tom Daschle's smiling face in the Washington Post yesterday under the heading "An upbeat Tom Daschle resurfaces at Ford's gala reopening". The first thing I thought was "He has no shame."
I guess if the IRS and the Justice Dept. have no problem with him breaking the law, then he doesn't either.
Shame only works as a deterrent if people accept that there are certain boundaries for conduct, and in our society that notion is rapidly becoming passe.
In our society, shame is inversely proportional to how rich, pretty, famous or powerful you are, regardless of your conduct.
Any chance we could shame Atlantic bloggers into avoiding split infinitives? Those last three words are making my skin crawl...
To ken in sc:
---I've often been jealous of my friend, who, from a strict Muslim family, was going to have an arranged marriage. He had no worries about it; he and his wife would go into it having the exact same expectation: she would take care of the home, he would work his tail off, they would have kids, they would never divorce, they would go to mosque, they would have sex regularly etc. Love? Nice, but not required. It would be based on respect for the institution, not some mythical Mariah-Carey-esque fantasy of "the one."
He had no worries or neurosis about living up to some image society created about men and women. He would be himself, she would be herself. Actions were required by both of them, but not become an image for the other.
His parents were arranged, and were the happiest couple I knew outside my own family.
jblog:
"Shame only works as a deterrent if people accept that there are certain boundaries for conduct, and in our society that notion is rapidly becoming passe."
--Darn true. Happens in every degenerating society: social norms previously enforced become laughed at, but then the cohesive nature of society disintegrates and society can no longer support itself. Rome, Egypt, Greece, Persia, Ottoman Empire--by the end, all commentators began describing them as decadent and amoral.
The only thing I notice different about our situation is the "don't judge" phenomenon. Previously, the failing culture merely laughed at the old morality; now, there is a direct criticism dressed up strangely.
I wonder when history reads about our nation, there will be psychological hay made, or whether we will be merely an anomoly.
Exploitive and abusive relationships are socially harmful. Children imprudently conceived and improperly raised are directly harmed directly and contribute to social harms. Narcissistic behavior (and it's nasty big brother, sociopathy) is socially harmful.
But you are working at a pretty high level of generality there. For instance, exploitative and abusive business partnerships are harmful too. Fertility clinics and artificial assisted reproduction lead to multiple children. And everyone is narcissistic, every day, in numerous ways. Our celebrity obsessed society bleeds narcissism. So does our corporate culture. Far more so than anything that anyone is doing in their sex life, and to far worse societal effect.
And yet you think sex-- one of the MOST socially harmless activities, except for the low percentage of acts of unprotected vaginal intercourse that lead to conception-- is the narcissistic, exploitative behavior among all these others that is worth regulating. And you don't care that you would be denying all this pleasure to all these people, because you are smarter than they are and know that such pleasure is bad for them and not important anyway.
It doesn't matter how you slice it-- when it comes down to it, you clearly have a perverted obsession with sex that makes you overestimate it's importance.
you clearly have a perverted obsession with sex that makes you overestimate it's importance.
My entire argument has been premised on the notion that sexual pleasure isn't that important, so that "repression" isn't that great a harm in exchange for the social (and personal) benefit of stable relationships based on respect and partnership rather than orgasms (especially where children are involved). That is, I do believe it patently true that sex has the power to cause great harm personally and socially, and that practicing restraint to avoid that harm is not particularly terrible.
You take the opposite view: sex is never or rarely harmful (that is, the negative consequences are unimportant), but the evanescent pleasure it provides is really, really important. That's fine; I don't hope to change your mind. But neither should you assume that your viewpoint is "inarguable."
BTW, I'm no fan of our celebrity culture, either, it just wasnt' the topic under discussion.
Rob, you can talk in generalities all you want, but you can't point to a specific mechanism by which, say, John placing his penis in Alice's mouth leads to the societal harms that you are claiming it does. All you can do is say that such conduct is REFLECTIVE of general trends of narcissism, etc., which are so ubiquitous anyway that there's no reason to think that individuals pursuing sexual pleasure makes any specific and measurable contribution to them.
When one talks about pregnancy or disease, at least there is a mechanism. Unprotected vaginal intercourse sometimes leads to unplanned pregnancies which increase health costs and (perhaps) destigmatizes such conduct.
But that's not your argument, because you know the vast, vast majority of sex acts neither lead to unplanned pregnancy or disease transmission. And when you get to these gauzy, generalistic harms that you assert, there's no plausible mechanism for why individuals pursuing sexual pleasure makes any meaningful contribution to the alleged harm. It's just something you say because you don't like people enjoying themselves.
I have cohabited with most of the commenters above - a few simultaneously - and I don't care who knows it.
you know the vast, vast majority of sex acts neither lead to unplanned pregnancy or disease transmission.
You're right--as I have already conceded--that specific sex acts between specific people are often not harmful. And as I've said (or if I haven't, I'll say it now), I don't care what perversions you engage in as long as you don't hurt anyone.
Nonetheless, I don't see how you can divorce (so to speak) a general culture of sexual libertinism from things like skyrocketing illegitimacy, high divorce rates even among parents, or the myriad personal emotional and physical harms that people suffer when exploited by assholes. These things need not, in the strictest theoretical sense, be the result of the unrestrained indulgence of compulsive appetites. People could be really careful about birth control and disease, they could avoid deluding themselves that their partner really does care and isn't just a user, they could live crazy unrestrained lives as singles but be buttoned-down and faithful once married, and they could adopt a freaky-deaky free-love-and-no-jealousy way of life. But they don't. And both they and we suffer for it.
There is no doubt some kind of libertine utopia where we all get more orgasms and nobody gets hurt. I believe in that utopia the same way you believe in the libertarian utopia of free markets where private charity helps the poor and everybody saves diligently for retirement.
Shame is certainly most useful as a group undertaking. Being the Church Lady in a group of hedonists is useless.
For example, my mother-in-law cheated on and left her husband last year. My husband was very upset with her and sought to shame her into at least feeling somewhat guilty about what she had done. But since not a single other person in her life acted similarly appalled at her behavior, the result is that the two are barely speaking to each other, and she continues merrily along with her new guy.
Contrast that with the reaction my own dad faced when he left his first wife for another woman in 1959. Not only did he lose most of his personal friends, but his career also suffered when his colleagues no longer respected him as highly. My dad never forgot that shame and guilt he felt, and it altered his behavior and outlook from then on.
I'm really having a hard time believing that Dilan's not just doing a "bit" here. I mean, surely he recognizes the negative costs associated with the sexual act that we shouldn't have done but did anyway? I mean, we *all* have at least one of those experiences, don't we?
since not a single other person in her life acted similarly appalled at her behavior
Why should they? She was just rubbing her genitals against something for pleasure. No reason for anybody to get upset. You husband is an evil pervert obsessed with sex to think there's anything wrong with that.
/sarcasm
Much of the above is a shameful discussion?
Shameless,
can you come and pick up your goat? And the old toaster?
I'm really having a hard time believing that Dilan's not just doing a "bit" here. I mean, surely he recognizes the negative costs associated with the sexual act that we shouldn't have done but did anyway? I mean, we *all* have at least one of those experiences, don't we?
On an individual level, sure. But that's like talking about the negative costs associated with, say, deciding to keep your current job instead of moving to the new start-up firm that goes on to make millions of dollars. The fact that such things happen does not indict the entire enterprise of having a job.
Lots of human decisions lead to regret. Lots of others don't. But that's not any reason to alter our public policies. And surely the fact that some sex acts are later regretted is a far cry from claiming that such sex acts result in some grand culture of narcissism that must be fought with every fibre of our beings.
Megan writes: "Without shame, what are you left with? It's accepting that you have no way to regulate peoples' behavior within the social network short of brute force or bribery."
This would be true if shame were the only human emotion.
Staash writes "To argue that shame is not an effective social deterrent for undesirable behavior is akin to arguing that respect is not an effective social incentive for desirable behavior."
No, it's not.
That presumption leads to all this nonsense.
When has anyone ever suggested that shame, or the shaming of others, protects us from thieves, rapists, murderers, traitors, or Republicans?
Fear of exposure, prosecution, conviction, and penalties does provide an effective deterrent, except we don't do that to the rich and powerful, with predictable results for our economy and politics.
And Mark Twain settled this long ago.
I would be ashamed if I believed enough, and voted for Barak Obama.
I can remember a few years ago (re: early to mid 2000s) reading a news story or two about a certain jilted wife whose marriage was broken up when her husband had an affair. (I want to say this was in a mid-atlantic state, strongly thinking MD or DE.)
She decided to do something about it legally. She sued them both for breach of contract (well, the hussy was technically for inducement of breach of contract).
What contract? The marriage contract.
I was surprised at 2 things: 1) this was a novel legal approach (really? in all the years during and "post-second wave feminism", with skyrocketing divorce rates and divorce lawyers doing everything possible, NO ONE tried this?)
and 2) how much criticism she received. I mean, the articles were all negative, with legal people and laymen stating she was being whiny and trying to embarass them for no reason.
Society, it seemed, doesn't want to shame people either socially or with the law.
So for those of you who see society/groups/individuals shaming people as being "wrong", would you see this as a valid suit? It is a contract, after all.
I have no problem with either, btw.
How many people here think Dilan is a woman? How many think Dilan knows any women?
When the majority of women agree with the comments Dilan is making, then I think it would be reasonable to use such sentiments as a basis for public policy. Women nearly always end up paying more for casual sexual, even when you take pregnancy off the table.
Most women I know object to having intimate relationships reduced to genitals rubbing together. That doesn't mean we all want marriage and babies, at least not at all phases of life. But a hooking up culture can be brutal and repellant too. I submit that we have gone too far in that direction, and that the Rob Lymans of the world should keep on arguing for a move back to more reasonable ground.
M.C.:
You are making a lot of essentialist assumptions about female sexuality, many of which are not consistent with credible surveys and studies (much less the lived experience of women).
Indeed, I will again recommend "The Feminine Mystique". Whatever one thinks of the gravity of the issues that modern women face with respect to sexuality in our current culture, there really isn't much of an argument that things were better when marriage was mandatory, divorce was frowned upon, and alternative lifestyles were stigmatized. That was a perfect system for maintaining the patriarchy but a lousy deal for women who had actual sexual desires.
Isn't there something shameful in willful self-contradictions? For example, professing libertarian values with one breath and advocating the "stimulus" bill with the next breath?
That was a perfect system for maintaining the patriarchy but a lousy deal for women who had actual sexual desires.
So is sex some trivial thing that I'm inflating in importance because I'm a pervert, or is it some central and essential part of human happiness, the lack of which among suburban housewives who write books makes widespread abandonment of impoverished children by their fathers seem footling and inconsequential?
I'm now thoroughly convinced that Dilan is either doing a bit or just doesn't have very much life experience.
Benjamin:
You guys seem mighty sure about what women actually think about sexuality.
Why don't you come out to a coffee house in Westwood or something and ask them? You might be VERY surprised and enlightened by what you actually hear.
I don't recall having said anything about what women think about sexuality. All I said is that I don't think you have very much life experience if you believe what you're writing, or you're a slow learner.
Like I said, I worked in family law for 7 years. I have some idea what the women (and men) that were our clients felt about sexuality. And, frequently, chasing a short-term sexual gratification leads to negative consequences. People get shorter and shorter vision the closer they get to orgasm.
But, hey, if you believe that sexual congress is scarcely more consequential than shaking someone's hand, bully for you. I hope it works out for you.
"The only thing I notice different about our situation is the "don't judge" phenomenon."
Well, and to your point Basic, it's not really a "don't judge" phenomenon. It's a "don't judge me -- however I reserve the right to judge you" phenomenon.
Those who cry out for tolerance are ordinarily only talking about it for themselves -- they're not particularly interested in extending to anyone else, particularly those who disagree with their points of view.
Hypocrisy? Yes, please.
This discussion has been so interesting to me I have read all of it and had various reactions to different points of view. This is the first time I've visited the Atlantic website and one of the rare times I've had enough time to read a discussion like this, since, though culturally I feel like a member of the chattering classes, demographically I am a single working mother; thus, as someone pointed out, part of a category of people who are much discussed but seldom get to participate in the discussion.
Being a single mother, I am grateful to live in a society that doesn't stone me, or prevent me from working and supporting my family, or take away my baby. Compared to those realities, reading about myself constantly reduced to a "social problem" and scapegoat for most of the ills of society is merely mildly provoking, merely confirming my sense of superiority over those who need scapegoats in order to shore up their sense of superiority (getting into a hall of mirrors here...) I didn't realize until now that that these distant and diffuse media images were meant to "shame" me. No one that I have direct contact with, at work, at daycare, at school or anywhere has gotten in my face to tell me I'm bad for not procuring that baby's daddy stay with us. So I don't feel like I live with shame, but if I did, what would the shamers want from me? What would be the social control or social good of shaming me, calling my baby names or denying us a basic livelihood? I say denying us a livelihood because the basic way that other societies enforce shame on women is by denying them the ability to work or subsist.
Like Rob, "I'm against narcissism, self-absorption, and destructive behavior." I liked his posts. I guess I am not a believer in shame as a way to get people to be responsible and concerned about others. This is a very American point of view, but I think responsibility comes from within the individual; each one of us is in charge of finding our own moral code that we can live with.
It was a great discussion, thanks.
Thank You Elaine, and kiss the baby for me.
Ben:
sex has a lot of cultural constructions attached to it that screw over many people.
But the act isn't the cultural construction. People who learn to ignore what other people think about their sex lives don't end up with the regrets you describe, even if they end up divorcing.
And further, it isn't helpful for cultural conservatives to continue incessantly insisting that sex for pleasure is wrong or impossible. It creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
Rejecting your silly views on sex is a sure route to having a lot happier sex life.
FOr more on the benefits of shame, I recommend Frederick Turner's work, esp. "Beauty" and "The Culture of Hope."
Elaine -
It might be worth breaking out different kinds of single motherhood. After all, single moms have been around for ages - back in the day, a mom was most often single if: a) her husband died young; or b) her husband ran off. In neither case was the single mom stoned, kept from working, or threatened with the loss of her children, because in neither case was her singleness her fault. Exhibit A: my grandma raised four kids on her own after my grandpa died just after the fourth was born. Nobody shamed her; many people supported her. If you are either of these kinds of single mother, then you need not worry about a return to shame (if it ever comes).
The single moms that the shamers in the world are concerned about are: c) women (usally young) who fornicate without much considering the possibility of a child and then find themselves pregnant; and d) women of any age who seek to become pregnant without intending to marry. If you are either of these kinds of single mother, then the shamers would not want anything from you except to hold you up as an example of what not to do.
It's very hard for anyone to know whether a given single mom is of type a, b, c, or d. This is why nobody has gotten in your face or told you you're bad: even the shamers want to give you the benefit of the doubt, so they assume that you are type a or b.
Rejecting your silly views on sex is a sure route to having a lot happier sex life.
The best available data state the contrary. The landmark "Social Organization of Sexuality" study at the University of Chicago indicates that married couples have sex more often than unmarried couples (cohabiting or otherwise). It also indicates that Catholics and conservative Protestants are happier with their sex lives than are non-religious people. In fact, the happiest folks in the survey were conservative Protestant women, who reported a frequency of orgasm that put every other class of woman in the shade.
The study's lead author, Edward Laumann, cautioned readers against drawing firm conclusions from the survey's religious data: sexual behavior and sexual satisfaction appear to be more strongly correlated with age, gender, and marital status than with religion. But the study does suggest that rejecting traditional sexual values out of hand, as Dilan Esper appears to be doing, is a mistake on more than one level.
People who learn to ignore what other people think about their sex lives don't end up with the regrets you describe
So you're saying that sexual regret is strictly a result of shame? That people don't, say, regret putting out for assholes who never call, or getting pregnant at a bad time?
In fact, the happiest folks in the survey were conservative Protestant women, who reported a frequency of orgasm that put every other class of woman in the shade.
According to Anne Coughlin, who has done substantial research on on historical attitudes towards rape, the Puritans believed that female orgasm was essential to conception (which of course they valued highly).
The landmark "Social Organization of Sexuality" study at the University of Chicago indicates that married couples have sex more often than unmarried couples (cohabiting or otherwise). It also indicates that Catholics and conservative Protestants are happier with their sex lives than are non-religious people.
But that doesn't tell us anything, because (1) they may not know what they are missing, (2) they may have simply been indoctrinated with the belief that sexual pleasure isn't as important as its reproductive function, and (3) just because people self-identify with a religion doesn't mean that they actually believe it (most Americans' religious beliefs are a mile wide and an inch deep).
So you're saying that sexual regret is strictly a result of shame?
No. It's strictly a result of the stupid and antiquated cultural constructions we attach to sex. Having the guy's penis in her doesn't cause her any damage at all (as long as the sex was consensual and protected)-- it's what society tells her about the meaning of that act that causes her the damage.
According to Anne Coughlin, who has done substantial research on on historical attitudes towards rape, the Puritans believed that female orgasm was essential to conception (which of course they valued highly).
Unfortunately, many of our patriarchal religious traditions had very different attitudes towards female sexuality. (And, of course, the puritans did not value or accept sexual diversity, which is tremendously important. Intolerance of what other people do in the bedroom is the cause of quite a lot of the regrets that you guys seem so concerned about.)
Let's throw this on the table. I suspect you guys have no problem with shaming gay men, right? After all, they are engaging in sex that you consider hedonistic, narcissistic, and non-procreative, right?
Andrew Sullivan's post on this issue is great too:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/the-limits-of-1.html
Note his last couple of paragraphs. You guys may idealize the shaming of behaviors (and Andrew is probably more sympathetic to your arguments on that than I am), but in the end what always ends up happening is that society stigmatizes groups. And Ted Haggard is, indeed, Exhibit A of the harm that sexual shaming actually does. Since his putting his penis in another man's mouth doesn't actually harm the rest of us, it is obviously only the cultural construction of that act within the evangelical community, not the act itself, that forces him into this horrible double life.
Ah yes, Dilan! The old "false consciousness" argument!
Sure these people are telling us that they're happy with their sex lives, but what do they know? Clearly they only think they're happy and if they would only drop their atavistic resistance to the brave new world that you want to construct they would learn that true happiness is actually whatever you say it is!
Whenever someone argues with the results of a happiness survey, it always makes me wonder about them...
"These random strangers can't possibly be happy for real, because they're living in a way that doesn't allow for true happiness according to my worldview! They only think they're happy because they've been spoonfed lies by the wrong poeple!"
Interestingly, those words could come equally easily from Dilan railing against antiquated and harmful societal sexual standards or a hard-line preacher railing against sexual transgressives who think they are happy living lives of libertine freedom but really don't know the true happiness of the lord's embrace...
But that doesn't tell us anything, because (1) they may not know what they are missing, (2) they may have simply been indoctrinated with the belief that sexual pleasure isn't as important as its reproductive function
So, they think they're happy and satisfied, but really, they're suffering from false consciousness?
Is it better to be a libertine who's perpetually frustrated despite constant sex, or a prude who's happy despite not owning a single piece of bondage gear?
I suspect you guys have no problem with shaming gay men, right? After all, they are engaging in sex that you consider hedonistic, narcissistic, and non-procreative, right?
There's nothing inherently narcissistic about gay sex, nor anything inherently wrong with non-procreative sex (I take it as given that all sex is at least somewhat hedonistic). So I see no inherent problem with being gay. As long as no one gets hurt, have at it (bearing in mind that an awful lot of gay men have gotten hurt by spreading disease...) I reserve the right to shame users and the abusive, however.
It's strictly a result of the stupid and antiquated cultural constructions we attach to sex.
Perhaps. But as I said above, your libertine utopia where everyone has hot sex and nobody gets hurt is as believable as a libertarian utopia where the government never interferes in the self-correcting market and everyone saves for their own retirement. Maybe someday, men and women will be able to frankly enjoy each other's bodies with absolutely no expectations (and do so in a protected fashion), and racists will realize their hatred is contrary to their economic interests and give it a rest. I'm looking forward to it.
You yourself would never believe your own arguments if applied to (say) gun ownership. Everyday, millions of people own (and shoot) guns, and nobody gets hurt, but they enjoy themselves. You can't make public policy based on the tiny number of people who hurt others, whether intentionally or accidentally. What harm does it do you if I fell like collecting guns?
It was not repression or shaming that caused Ted Haggard to live a double life. It was his inability to keep it in his pants.
I'd probably enjoy doing drunken college girls every other night, but given the negative impact that would have on my family, I don't. Pardon me if I don't understand why Ted Haggard, Bill Clinton, and Christina's mother-in-law can't do the same.
So I see no inherent problem with being gay. As long as no one gets hurt, have at it (bearing in mind that an awful lot of gay men have gotten hurt by spreading disease...)
But why do you draw the line at gayness? Nobody gets hurt when heterosexuals have casual sex, or indulge kinky fetishes, or watch porn, or go to a swinger's club either.
It seems to me you have a way-too-finely calibrated sense of what sex is "harmful" and what isn't.
In any event, even if you have pure motives and consistent beliefs, it seems to me that Andrew is right that in practice, this shaming will always end up giving the shaft to unpopular groups rather than unpopular behaviors.
You yourself would never believe your own arguments if applied to (say) gun ownership. Everyday, millions of people own (and shoot) guns, and nobody gets hurt, but they enjoy themselves. You can't make public policy based on the tiny number of people who hurt others, whether intentionally or accidentally. What harm does it do you if I fell like collecting guns?
Rob, I believe the Second Amendment means what it says (i.e., that gun regulations are only constitutional to the extent they bear some relationship to ensuring that the armed citizenry can come to the defense of the free state if needed) and further, that most gun control is not only unconstitutional but pointless. I would favor registration and tracing materials because I actually think that a gun registry would help solve gun crimes. But as far as people keeping and bearing weapons (including supposedly "dangerous" ones like assault weapons), I have come to believe that the NRA and the gun rights community is right that we shouldn't punish the vast majority of gun owners who simply like the thrill of owning guns, use them for self-protection or hunting or target shooting, or are interested in them as a hobby, because a relatively small number of people use them irresponsibly.
Dilan, you just shocked the hell out of me there, and proved me wrong. Sorry I misjudged you.
Perhaps my harmometer is making fine distinctions without a difference. But it seems to me that gay men in the bathhouse know what they're getting and they choose it with their eyes open. I'm less sure that women who sleep with cads know what they're getting; the capacity for self-delusion is substantial. That is, I don't think you need to have a prudish morality to regret sleeping with an asshole, or to regret a promiscuous and narcissistic youth. And broadly speaking, I think that anything that encourages us to focus on either the short-term or on ourselves is bad for both individual happiness and social harmony. We already have a strong motivation to do so, and resisting it is desireable.
And of course the biggest harm to society comes from poor people having children they can't care for. Rich people can afford their mistakes; poor people cannot. If you can think of a way to impose a prudish morality on the poor but not on the rich, well, I can live with that. But I can also live with a lot fewer orgasm in exchange for a lot less crime and multi-generational dependency.
A secondary harm is found in widespread divorce of couples with children; again, a prudish and generally duty-oriented morality would both restrain divorce and help us to resist the selfish motivations that drive many divorces such as infidelity or the need to "find myself," to name the cause of two divorces of my mother's acquaintances.
"I have unashamedly moved in with a boyfriend, and am still not ashamed. But if we think people should marry, and shouldn't cohabit, than shame is a much better way to get there than giving people stupid marriage classes, paying them to get married, or making it illegal for unmarried people to rent an apartment."
Megan, I think you are underestimating the real costs to you of a culture that would shame your for cohabiting with an unmarried partner. You are focusing on the notion that shame is merely a psychological attitude that people might treat you with, a kind of subtle disdain. Obviously, that would have little real effect on your choice to cohabit, and it isn't historically what "shaming" is about.
What would have a real effect on your actions? Well, real shaming of you, which would mean that your closest friends would simply tell you off, break off your friendship, and no longer associate with you. Most of your family would do the same, disowning you, never inviting you to family events, maybe only sending messages to you telling you they won't re-associate until you give up this dreadful choice of yours and either marry your partner or leave him. Your landlord would evict you, to make it clear how deeply society disaproves of your choices. Your employer, The Atlantic, would fire you from your job as a blogger, citing the need to protect their own public reputation.
Now, if all of that were actually done to you, I suspect that you would actually prefer to endure a few marriage classes, etc. You are simply not appreciating what a real culture of shame would require of you, and how much pressure it could bring to bear on you to change your mind about marriage. This is what a real culture of shame is about, enforcing social norms through social expulsion of code-breakers.
The reason why you imagine shame to be harmless is because you feel certain that your own social circle would never actually shame you, that your friends and family would remain loyal. But that defeats the whole purpose of the thought-experiement. Clearly you don't think what you are doing is wrong, but what if everyone around you did, and expelled you from their social circle accordingly. I think the pain and suffering on your part would be too great to endure. I think you would break down and get married. Am I wrong?
One of the problems I see with 'shame' is that it relies on a strong sense of an external locus of control, and that can be a double-edged sword. If we teach kids to rely only on what a larger group tells them what is 'shameful' or not, then we as parents are setting them up for disaster. Because what do Christians do if the society at large decides it's shameful to be seen at church, to be Christian? What if we become so enamoured of the concept of shame as a tool that we end up like Peter denying Christ due to our shame? No, it's better to have young people develop an internal compass whose ethics go above and beyond what society's 'norms' may be.
What conrad says. It's one thing to talk about "shame" in the abstract, but in concrete terms, when people are seriously shamed, they lose huge tangible benefits and their lives can be made a living hell.
A nice way of putting this is to ask yourself whether you really think that, say, single mothers should be treated by a community, friends, family, and employers in the same way that an openly gay male would have been treated in, for instance, a small city in Mississippi in 1952. Or the way that some close-knit religious immigrant communities treat children who take a significant other or spouse from another religion.
Once you turn the "shame" switch on, it's pretty difficult to turn it back off.
You live in my head.
When a memory
outshines and
a glimmer of
love discovers
a care, you
live in my
head....
Francesco Sinibaldi
Right, Dilan. And not only that, but as others have noted, fear of shaming doesn't necessarily prevent an act, rather it often causes people to take it underground, sometimes with horrific consequences, even from a Christian point of view:
For example, Christians believe suicide is wrong. And yet closeted gay teens can feel such shame about homosexuality that he/she commits an act that has lasting harmful impact.
Another example: a teenage girl, who, knowing the shame that will come if her parents find out she's pregnant, decides to get an abortion before her parents find out.
Third: Slave plantation: Black man and white lady get caught havung an affair; due to society's shaming, white lady claims rape with predictable results.
I wonder if he has not given any thought to the fact that shame isn't so much a long term benefit to the one being shamed but to the people that could find themselves in the same situation. For example whilt it is true that that one single mother being shamed won't change her situation very much to the positive, however seeing her being shamed might make other girls more likely to make sure that they don't get pregnant and find themselves in the same situation.