Shame blocks the paths toward freedom and autonomy, cajoling us into choices that may not serve us in the long run. — Melissa Petro

A look at Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification by Melissa Petro

When was the last time you felt shame? Real shame? Shame you could feel in your lungs, in your guts?

Chances are, if you are a woman, it hasn’t been all that long. In the book Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification by Melissa Petro, readers learn just how disproportionately affected women are than men by shame, and it is not because we are emotional or empathetic or sensitve; it is because of the society in which we live.

Shame is, as author Melissa Petro says, a “pernicious emotion that defies definition. It’s the painful distress that comes from knowing you’ve not lived up to an expectation, however unrealistic or impossible that expectation might be.”

Woman in a Striped Dress | Edouard Vuillard

Petro wrote this book after being publicly shamed and humiliated for being a schoolteacher with a history as a sex worker. After an essay of hers about the sex industry went viral, Petro was swiftly removed from her position and attacked by internet bullies. She ended up being the focus of several New York Post articles with headlines including City officials seeking to terminate ‘hooker-teacher’ and Idiot prosti-teacher didn’t learn lesson.

I needn’t point out how those headlines are the digital equivalent of laughing in someone’s face.

While Petro documents this experience in Shame on You, the bulk of the book is sharing other women’s stories of shame, along with science-backed tidbits about the effect shame has on the body and ways to work through it. It interrogates the shame cycle and gets at the root of why women are so much more likely to experience it.

We all know shame affects the mind, but there are also physical ramifications of carrying shame around like a heavy badge of dishonor:

• Childhood shame leads to “chronic anxiety, low self-esteem, feelings of emptiness, perfectionism, unhealthy relationships, and a lack of healthy self-love.”

• Shame can get in the way of patients seeking treatments for both mental and physical health ailments.

• The brain reacts to shame as if facing physical danger. The prefrontal cortex triggers stress hormones, just as it does in response to physical pain.

“At its core,” Petro writes, “shame is an existential feeling of unworthiness and profound inadequacy. It is not just the fear that others will find you unlovable. It is a deep-down fear that you don’t deserve to be loved.”

Given the expectations placed on women, it is little wonder we so often deem ourselves inadequate.

At the gym my family and I go to, children of the opposite sex are not allowed in the locker rooms. This means that whenever I take my three-year-old son swimming, we have to use the family locker room. I hate it in there. I hate how small it is and how the floor is always wet. I hate that we often have to wait for a changing room to open up so we can disrobe privately.

Mostly, I hate that dads are in there.

I feel uncomfortable being in such an intimate space with men. Even if nobody is getting naked in the communal space, it doesn’t feel safe. Why is that? Do men feel unsafe in there? I would venture to guess safety has never crossed their mind while in the locker room with their children. Meanwhile, I feel ashamed that I hate it so much. I tell myself to suck it up — and I do. I take my children in there multiple times a week.

Petro quotes Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse’s take on womanhood. Hesse says that while to some, the definition of being a woman feels immutable and fixed, “others of us are reminded of our womanhood when we step out into the world each day and offer ourselves for judgement.”

Perhaps Hesse would see in my aversion to the family locker room a concern I’d not identified myself: an unwanted exposure to judgement.

“For everyone, but for women especially,” Petro says, “shame blocks the paths toward freedom and autonomy, cajoling us into choices that may not serve us in the long run.”

The book shares many real-life situations in which women have been stunted due to the shame inflicted upon us. It’s not a whiney, poor-me collection of stories, but rather a fact-based, science-backed book intending to dismantle women’s war against ourselves.

Combatting shame

Petro has worked extensively on ridding herself of shame. And while she’s doing much better than she did after her removal from the job she loved as a schoolteacher, she still finds herself trapped in shame’s awful grip.

She says, “Not wanting to feel shame takes me out of my body. It makes me give away my power. It makes me give my power away to men. It makes me give my power away to men who devalue me. The more I am devalued, the more I fight for them to see and recognize my worth. This is a losing strategy, but I still do it.”

It’s a losing strategy; it’s circuitous and omnipresent. But there are ways to fight it.

“Relief begins when you let down your guard, return to your body, and let yourself feel the emotion you’re trying so fervently to avoid. You’re likely to discover the source of your emotional pain isn’t actually some sort of inherent worthlessness — that it is, instead, some sexist cultural expectation you’ve mistaken for your own belief,” she says. She now knows what to do when she feels shame creeping up on her. She now considers shame an opportunity to come back to reality and revise her thinking about herself; to “realize a deeper truth.”

Retelling and reclaiming our stories of shame is another combat against the unwanted emotion, and that’s what this book is. Because when you put your emotional upheaval into words, “your mental and physical health improves. We write for personal discovery and individual transformation.”

But we write, too, to share our stories and change others’ lives.

Shame on You comes out in September. Pre-order it here! (I received an early copy. Thank you Putnam!)

What I’m reading: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.

What are you reading?

See you next week. Love,

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