Shame and/or humiliation are a driving motivation in hundreds of revenge movies—from horror flicks like Carrie to dramas like The Help. Shame was also on display in last year’s Oscar-nominated Manchester By the Sea, about a young man whose drunken carelessness results in the death of his children, and the appropriately named 2011 movie, Shame, about a sex-addicted man whose encounters bring no intimacy or pleasure, only physical release, followed […]
Archive | August, 2017
M. Stone | You’re a woman now
We all remember that girl the one who developed early in elementary school and bled on her desk seat. We avoided her like she had a disease more scandalous than mono. We dreaded the day our own bodies would betray us. The novelty of “being a woman” faded fast. We scrambled to hide our shame with sweaters wrapped tight around our waists, panties lined with stacked sanitary napkins. Reeking middle […]
Emily Bowles | You see me, a woman flayed
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. — Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub They saw me, a woman flayed. You will hardly believe how I saw myself when he treated me that way, how much it altered me a person her person mine for the worse. I see you watching the spectacle of my body […]
Beverly Engel | Hypercritical and shaming parents
Beverly Engel, in her book It Wasn’t Your Fault: Freeing Yourself from the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion (New Harbinger, 2015), wrote about the damaging effect of shaming on children: The source of much toxic shame in our culture is hypercritical and shaming parents, who—often without realizing it—send their children the message that they are never good enough. Even more destructive than deliberate shaming statements such […]
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