Note: This article is also available in Spanish.
Shame, it’s the most common and most powerful weapon of control and coercion used against men in a culture driven by archaic traditions, as well as the modern mirror, gender ideology.
It was used successfully to coerce men of urban 1914 England to die and to kill in the frozen, bloody trenches of the first world war. Women handed out white feathers to men who were not in uniform; a public humiliation proving you were not a real man unless you enlisted and put your survival and well being a very distant second, after the interests of your community and king.
That’s how powerful shame is. Men chose to die, and suffer by the millions, rather than endure it.
It’s used successfully today to coerce men by women handing them an updated white feather. The white ribbon campaign: prodding men, with shame, to admit they belong to a class of abusers, rapists, predators and subhumans, and to wear that admission as a pledge to be something better than they are without it.
So, what else is shame good for? When men find themselves experiencing failure or suffering, shame keeps them from seeking help. In fact, shame is used to justify preventing them from demanding the help afforded to anyone else in pain.
As the problem solvers of the human race, shame helps men who have fallen on hard times to man up, swallow their pain and just kill themselves. Four out of five suicides in Canada are men.
Shame is useful as a weapon to force compliance and silence. What is a real man? It’s a man who does what his social betters require of him. He does what he’s supposed to — to hell with his own needs. Pain? Real men don’t feel it. Grief? REAL Men don’t feel it, or any other emotion that does not serve the fancy of others. And, of course, after they’ve died by their own hands, nobody needs to regard them as humans. Defective appliances don’t merit any sympathy. Take that broken equipment to the curb for pick-up.
Almost all men have an innate sense of justice. However, by application of shame, this can be completely suppressed and silenced. They endure violence, censorship, intimidation, and harassment in the name of social-justice. Social-justice — which should not be confused with actual justice.
Shame, and the pressure to conform is also a great tool to retard progress toward a more humane and compassionate society. Real men, subject to coercion through shame, are pushed to deny their own humanity, their own need for humaneness and compassion, thus stalling society from dispensing those things to half the human beings that need them.
“I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”
The quote is from former US Senator Barbara Jordan. She should have looked into a mirror. But what about men who prove Jordan’s statement and the ideology behind it are nothing except evil lies? Men who demonstrate great compassion and empathy, for themselves or their fellow men have their manhood called into question. They’re rewarded for their courage to feel with loss of their status as men. They are shamed. Thus, for men who have not yet identified their capacity for shame as a maladaptive product of a feminized culture, shame serves very well to stifle and suppress that which might make them great, The qualities of justice and compassion, two fundamental elements of their identity, are corrupted and usurped for the use of others, specifically women.
How about affection, attraction, desire and love? How about expressing any of these basic human emotions without the permission of whoever might be the object of those feelings? How about the expression of those things without the permission of the consensus arbiters of public identity?
Attraction? Desire? If expressed without a permission which must ultimately be guessed at, a man is a creep. Shame, in this case, is the weapon to extinguish what some writers through history have called the noblest of human impulses. Love. Of course shame is the weapon to extinguish affection, attraction, desire, love, and trust as well.
Of course, all this assumes that a man subjected to control and coercion of purposefully applied shame has not made a choice to abandon it, to just dump it. Obviously, this is not something done trivially or easily, but self ownership includes ownership of your own emotions.
Is there an argument buried in the previous statement for men having no emotions? Is there a whiff of that old, toxic idea that men have none, or that they possess the emotional inner lives of a class of stunted, regressive, domineering and woman-oppressing subhumans? Sure, even a half-arsed attempt at spin could present such an argument. In fact, wrapped up within such an opinion is the same old weapon used to silence, to marginalize and dismiss men who do what we all keep hearing that real men shouldn’t do; namely, to express desire, experience grief, or give voice to love of their fellows with the very foolish hope that it be reciprocated.
However, informed self-ownership within a gender ideological culture inevitably includes the recognition that shame, kept within a man’s emotional repertoire, is dysfunctional. Conforming to the group was a good survival strategy in the resource-scarce hunter gatherer communities of our ancient ancestors, and shame is one of the tools of enforced conformity. However, in a modern setting in which the ideology of the group is often irrational, shame remains the go-to tactic of coercing conformity for the benefit of parasites.
Shame on you for recognizing your own humanity. Shame on you for not putting yourself in harm’s way for the convenience of others. Shame on you for attempting to help anyone other than members the leisure caste. Shame on you for exercising moral discrimination which does not conform to the convenience of privileged children. Shame on you for not submitting to your allotted role of disposable appliance. Shame on you for rejecting violence against your person. Shame on you for refusing to dispense violence for the convenience of your social superiors. Shame on you for daring to think you are not guilty, simply by virtue of your biology. Shame on you for not agreeing you are sexual predator. Shame on you for having emotions, almost as if you thought you were a human being. You’re not, you are a wooden robot, and if you’ve been damaged beyond your continued utility, we’ll use you for firewood. So man up, and get back onto the goddamn treadmill of protect, provide, serve, die, and kill when it is convenient for others.
Shame and it’s continued place within a man’s emotional repertoire, when recognized as maladaptive, can be discarded.
And once discarded, what can a man do without it? How about exercise personal judgement and discrimination, and act on that judgement. Without shame, there is no reason to quietly accept bigotry practiced by a majority in public. There is no reason to accept the idea that sexually mutilating infants is anything except monstrous, even when that mutilation is widely accepted as normal. There is no reason to excuse violent crime even if it is committed by members of our culture’s leisure caste.
An inclusive list of what is possible without the encumbrance of shame could fill pages. But such an attempt is unnecessary.
There ceases to be any reason, when shame is gone, to fail to recognize violence for what it is, even if practiced by the superficially pretty. There is no reason, without shame not to express affection, desire or love. And when the weapon of shame is predictably used in an effort to silence that expression, there remains no reason to not respond to such aggression with sharp and condemning rebuke.
For men it is time to abandon shame. It is long past time to become completely shameless.
