Marjorie Taylor Greene making you afraid of going to the toilet is what gets the RWNJs off, and it’s not about increasing the market demand for laxatives. 2022’s election should not be about repressing a small number of people, especially those children and their parents who are being stigmatized in places like Texas. And then there’s the larger intersectional community, and other groups targeted by RWNJs. Trumpists and the GOP exploit those fears of otherness. A new NY Times editorial makes an important distinction between shame and stigma, making troll accounts like “Libs of TikTok” more pernicious by their disinformation shitposting.
The account also posts targeted attacks on transgender and gender-nonconforming social media users. This harassment includes claims that adults who teach children about LGBTQ identities are “abusive” and claims that being gender-nonconforming or an ally is a “mental illness,” at least one of which has been removed from Twitter for breaking terms of service. Libs of TikTok has also advocated for all openly LGBTQ teachers to be fired and called on its followers to contact schools that are allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms'' and “boys and girls sharing bedrooms on field trips” to express their hostility towards pro-LGBTQ rules.
The shame goblin has friends in places both high and low. Last month, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told a conservative podcast audience that Democrats “tried to shame” her for supporting the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Times editorial board recently implicated fear of shame as cause for Americans’ “losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country.”
That’s not to minimize how bad shame feels. Shame can be excessive — toxic shame, it is called — but it can also be functionally good, like when it keeps your pants on in public. Despite the bad rap that shame gets in our overly psychoanalyzed culture, it is merely a feedback loop that tells you something about your behavior as well as the expectations of others. Psychologists often refer to shame as a secondary emotion, one that can be positive or negative, depending on the primary emotions that generate it. Those primary emotions are more dangerous to public life. Anger or contempt, for example. Yet we have chosen to turn shame into a social problem. It is bizarre to think that we should legislate, regulate or condition away an emotion or that we should do so for shame when contemptuous, irrational anger is right there.
Shame. Shamed. Ashamed. Shunned. We use these interchangeably to describe myriad fears, but shunning comes closest to the public problem that we are actually trying to name. Shunning is a close cousin to stigma in that they are both about what we do to people rather than how people feel about themselves. It isn’t shame but stigma that jeopardizes our constitutional rights, our human agency and our collective well-being. Stigma sorts and stratifies people, assigning them to categories against their will. Powerful forces then attach moral and political value to those categories that cut some people out of public life. If we ask not who is ashamed to speak but who is stigmatized for speech, it is easier to diagnose what is a crisis and what is fearmongering.
Greene is an example of why it matters that we get that diagnosis right. She operates like a classic disinformation artist. She elides feelings of shame with the moral clarion of stigmatization. She suggests that being a pro-white American conservative politician makes others treat her like an immoral or unserious person. She calls that being “shamed,” but her rhetoric argues that she has been pushed from feeling shame and into the realm of stigmatization. Of course, Greene navigates public life with a trail of shame in her wake, but if she were to change her behavior tomorrow or next year, history suggests that her life would not be ruined. Bad-faith actors want the moral superiority of being stigmatized. But some behavior is, well, shameful. Being ashamed is not cause for alarm in these circumstances.
Not everyone is a bad actor when it comes to concerns about shame. There absolutely is an online outrage machine that targets people, exploits the way internet platforms work and causes psychological terror in the process. Much has been said about Justine Sacco, arguably the first person to lose her job because of the internet outrage machine, in 2013. She told a bad joke on Twitter, boarded an international flight and was fired soon after she landed. It was harsh. Sacco took a hit professionally. But today she is working in the profession for which she trained. If she was ever truly stigmatized, her very public shaming does not appear to have erased her from society.
www.nytimes.com/...
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